William
by cagd
Summary: Spike after shanshu. A long and strange journey beginning with a trip to the booby hatch.
1. Blurred Reflections

"We are born naked, wet, and hungry, and get slapped on our ass... then things get worse." - _Anon._

* * *

If you'd known that going stark raving nutters was this fun, you would have done it years ago instead of just letting it play peek-a-boo with the people around you in small doses. 

_We wouldn't have let Dru have all the fun. We would have joined her in her shrieking and had a gay old time ripping our hair out by the handfuls and eating filth instead of tying up her hands and making sure that anything too nasty like drain cleaner and dogshit were kept well out of her reach._

Until now, you were an amateur, doing things by half measures:

William cried a lot in private because he knew without ever being told that nobody liked him because they thought he was weird and because he didn't know how to be any other way.

_They were right, mate, we were weird!_

After chipping, Spike whispered and screamed lewd obscenities at everyone he met and made grandiose plans that inevitably detonated in his face when he wasn't holed up in his various lairs drinking himself into a stupor to kill the pain.

_Ahhhh, the soddin' good old days, miss 'em? Hell yeah!_

You on the other hand, have free reign to shriek, gibber, flail, flap, screech, bellow, thrash, slam your head against hard objects when you can find them, and roll around in your own excrement the moment the orderlies forget and turn their backs on you.

When you're insane on this level, you can do anything and people look the other way, excusing your behavior because "He can't help it, poor thing" - it's the ultimate freedom.

If you thought becoming a vampire was liberating, you should try going nuts.

It's brilliant!

Can't handle reality?

Don't acknowledge it -instead, yelp, screech, claw at your eyes, and lie on your back flailing your arms and legs like the man-sized cockroach you are.

Don't want to remember things that were done to you?

Or did to others?

Go all catatonic like Dru on one of her good days and enjoy the beautiful serenity of an empty mind while outside for all you know someone could be pouring gasoline on you and striking a match - why should you care?

_Same for when we don't want to remember the things that we did to the people around us!_

The food's terrible and they won't let you smoke or drink, but to have someone around who'll pick up after you, wipe the shit off your body after you've had a good wallow, and keep you from cutting your throat on a piece of broken mirror is a fair exchange.

_They took our mirror away after that. Now we have to look at ourselves in the steel one embedded in the lavvy wall - all cold and blurry. Blurry's because they took our glasses away the first day because we tried to use them to stab the bloke what had the bed next to us with them because we didn't fancy the sound of his snoring. It also means we can't read, but there's sod all to read but torn up ten year old magazines, so who cares?_

When you're insane, you can take your clothes off and wander around naked, mumbling to yourself while you wank off to your evil heart's content, hoping that somebody will step in your jizz, slip, fall, and break their bloody necks and then laugh hysterically until you wet yourself when it does happen!

Don't like the orderly who's in charge of you? Shit yourself and have the satisfaction of not only smearing it all over his clean white coat but of his badly concealed disgust at having to clean you up like a great big enormous baby while you laugh at his expression because he can't do a damned thing about it as long as the doctor's looking.

And oh, the doctor? If you don't like him/her, you can always unzip and let fly!

_Six years of expensive education just so that you can be a urinal to a lunatic with serious impulse control problems? How very bleedin' bloody funny!_

Spike was too busy being cool and protecting Dru from herself to ever have any real fun. Later on he was too busy being the Slayer's and than his sire's whipping boy to have time to indulge.

Willie didn't know how. Even if he did, he was too much under mummy's thumb.

Poetry was his only escape, but you?

You?

You can do anything because all you have left to you is your own body and it's wastes. Now that's freedom, I tell you!

_Keep it up mate, because sooner or later they'll get tired of us doing this and take away all our clothes and put us in a diaper and a one piece coverall like something a great big baby would wear, with a zip in the back that as limber as we are, we can't reach. But when they do, we'll just find another way to piss them off._

_Maybe we'll just go in for target spitting or nosebleeds. That'd be grand; bang our face on something hard like an orderly's forehead and get ourselves a great big old gusher all over the place like a lawn sprinkler, with us lapping it up off the floor just like in the good old days when we were free and trapped all at the same time!_

Should you get too whacky?

_Why they throw in all those free drugs!_

A whole pharmaceutical rainbow cornucopia of uppers-downers-sideways... aaaaaaaannnnnnd... oblivions!

Brilliant!

_Needles, pills and syrups - too bad they don't throw in a free prize after we've taken our fiftieth lithium, say, a bottle of Jack Daniels or something, but a bloke bloody well can't have everything!_

Speakin' of shit and pills, how about vomit? Some fun there! All that lovely medication in it's upper-downer-sideways-oblivion technicolor glory and the horrible food spewed on the world, down the crapper, onto the floor, onto people you don't like, and yourself.

_Wheeeeeee, some fun there!_

Too bad you didn't think of this sooner so they could have wired you up with electrodes and sent the volts through your nut, or better, beat the Initiative to it and slice your brain up through your eye sockets so that you can be just one more happy idiot?

_Wheeeeeeeee!_

If it's so much fun then, being insane and having people you hate pick up after you, then why can't you stop crying?

If it's so much fun, how come you want so very badly to go home?

_Where's "home" mate? We've no place to go should we ever get out, we've dirtied every nest that we've ever made and rendered it unlivable._

If this is so bloody funny, how come you aren't laughing? And when you do, how come you can't stop?

_If this is so fuckin' great, this insanity thing, how come if any of our old enemies came to visit us, we'd start crying and beg for them, even that bastard Xander, to take you home with them so we could creep into their basement and hide behind the hot water heater in among the bags of potting soil and piles of old newspapers until it all goes away?_

Why did you have to run away after you shanshued?

Why?

_Because we hated everybody and thought we could make it on our own when for our entire vile existence on this earth we've always had somebody else to pick up after us, somebody to look out for us even if they said they hated us._

_We were tolerated, mate, tolerated and marginally maintained, that's what. We needed them more than they needed us - they kept us sane._

The Initiative was nothing new, not really, they were just a symptom.

_A symptom of what?_

That even for a demon you were bent.

Seriously bent.

_So we couldn't function? So what?_

That's what the booby hatch is for - people, and you are people now, right? Not an animal, not a demon, not a...you're people? It's for people who can't cope.

And you couldn't.

The world grew up and abandoned you when your back was turned for over a century.

Left you washed up on the beach like a dead crab, mate, all white bellied and stinking, for the gulls to pick at.

You found that nobody wants somebody that can't function - so one bad job after another because for all your cunning, the only thing left to you was that or crime and ever since Spike gave you your body back, you just weren't up to the challenge. So one night you got fired one time too many, drank your pay and drove head on into a bridge abutment...

...splatto!

Too bad the doctors did their job because you survived.

Too bad they listened to your ravings while your were unconscious.

Too bad they took them seriously. Particularly after you went to the AA and the NARCANON meetings as ordered by the court once you could walk without crutches after you deliberately ran your car into that bridge abutment and started telling all: Vampires? Slayers? Who the soddin' hell ever heard of that?

That's not real! Rent, bills, and traffic tickets are real...then there was that old scar tissue in your nut, deep in your brain. They found that when they were picking the pieces of your coconut out of the soft pudding of your brain after you tried to kill yourself because when Lindsey brought you back to annoy your Sire, he didn't have the common decency to have left that out of your melon just the same as he left your borrowed soul intact... and you made the mistake of telling them who gave you that scar tissue, didn't you old mate? Perhaps you shouldn't have relished telling them the parts where you murdered girls slowly so that they knew what was being done to them even as they died...

_Bloody stupid, that was, honesty!_

They found your driver's license in you wallet and took it seriously. Now you're a Ward of the State - a psychotic nobody named Billy Tully because what the Initiative started with it's gouge and slice, Wolfrum and Hart finished with their paperwork. Now why didn't you actually look at it when Harmony handed it to you, instead of grunting, "Yeah, great, whatever!" before you jammed it in your coat pocket and forgot about it because you had a bottle of something expensive that you'd pinched off Peaches and an ambitious secretary in a black silk nightie with a whip waiting for you on Angel's desk with her legs wide open?

_Thanks to your carelessness, we're dead meat, mate! Just like a baby left in a cardboard box on the courthouse steps one night. Only the wolves crept into town and ate us, leaving the mystery of our little chicken bones and eggshell skull strewn all over the front lawn next to the VFW flag pole and the Civil War monument of the constipated looking sojerboy that doesn't look like anybody in particular._

That's you!

And the people you left behind in your pride?

They don't know where you are.

_Probably don't care either, not after what we've put them through all these years. Otherwise, if they did, wouldn't they have come looking for us by now?_

_Nope._

"Him? Good riddance. God, what a cock-up!"

So why did you keep crawling back to them time after time, regardless of what you said or did to them or what they said or did to you?

_Because they were all we had._

You can love, you know it, your kind, well what you once were, could love. Dru understood love better than you did, stupid, brilliant, beautiful ugly Drusilla. How come in your love you twisted everything that came near you?

Because that's the nature of your Beast, to bend, twist, smash and pervert everything you/it touches. To be unable to tell the difference between love and hate, and to act on it without thinking.

_We were bloody good at it!_

If you could just get to a phone, call one, call all of them, even your Grandsire, and beg their forgiveness, would they? Would they come rescue you? Or would they just laughingly hang up and leave you in this nightmare? You're too frightened to find out, to find a way to get to a phone, a mailbox, anything, but you're too dangerous to yourself and others to be allowed near the real world.

Speakin' of memories, how about your memories? Which ones are real?

Was William real? Was Spike?

Or are you what those papers that Wolfram and Hart cooked up for you before you left the fold what's true?

Did the earth really swallow an entire town with you on the bottom being all heroic and sacrificial lamb-like, or are you just plain old fucked up Billy Tully, the unwanted son of a G.I. and a nice English girl who died because she liked heroin a little too much; who got sent to backwoods Mississippi to live with your drunken father who beat the living shite out of you every chance he got?

Were you a vampire for over 100 years living a life of magnificent cruelty or just a nobody, the mean kid that nobody liked who always sat at the back of the classroom throwing spitwads and setting fires?

Were the Scoobies and the Slayer a secret group protecting the world from evil that you sometimes helped but mostly hindered, or were they just some bunch of High School losers that you went to school with who were inexplicably tolerant of you no matter how badly you treated them? The same group of kids who occasionally let you sit with them in the lunch room when generally people pointedly got up and moved to a different table whenever you sat down next to them because you didn't know how to make or be a friend with anybody including yourself?

Was the Slayer a fighter in the Army of Light or a cheerleader that you rutted after desperately knowing that she'd as soon pick up a fresh, steaming dog turd with her bare hand as even look at you?

Were you the sheltered, smothered son of a Victorian mother or a filthy little boy who screamed obscenities and threw rocks at passing traffic in a small Mississippi town before the State stepped in and took you and your little half-sister Dru away from your father?

Were you a magnificent killer, feared and beautiful, the scourge of a continent, or were you a sobbing little boy apprehensively hiding under the bed from your foster father who's come to bugger you for the fourth time this week since the State placed you with him and his wife because you were so small and pretty for a boy that he "just couldn't help himself"?

_What is real?_

_What is real?_

_Tell me, please, somebody tell me what is real?_

The mirror is real, but is the face that's looking back at you real? Looking at your blurred, unshaven self in the mirror after a 100 plus year absence - is that real or is Billy Tully, hated bad boy, mean kid who sets fires and hits people for no reason real?

You remember Willow as a witch doing wonderful magics that you can't begin to comprehend, but you also remember sitting behind her in the eighth grade; copying the answers on her geography test when you weren't smacking her on the back of the head and putting gum in her hair to make her cry. You remember the humiliation of because you were so intent on cheating you didn't realize that you'd copied her sentence, "Billy Tully is a big mean poopy doo-doo head who eats his own boogers when he thinks nobody's looking!" as the answer to "What is the capital of Argentina?" The teacher called you up to her desk and made you read it out loud to the rest of the class before she sent you swaggering outside but mortified on the inside to the office for detention.

_Tell me, which one is the truth?_

_You tell me, mate, I only work here!_

You remember Buffy moving like a dancer as she staked monster after monster; inexplicably sparing you every time even though you were one of the biggest monsters she'd ever met and often said so to your face. You also remember her hanging from the arm of first that big dumb prick Angel the exchange student from Galway who tolerated you with good natured Irish contempt and then that even bigger dumb prick Riley, the captain of the football team who once hit you so hard when you mouthed off to him that he snapped your wrist like a candystick. You remember laying in your bed at night in Juvenile after throwing a brick through a church window in front of a cop, wanking off, imagining that it was her you were sticking it too, only she didn't say, "Gross, go away!" but, "I love you, Billy." and held you in her arms and loved you and only you.

_Tell me, which one is the truth?_

_You tell me, mate, I only work here!_

You remember Giles as a Watcher, way soddin' smarter than you'll ever be, whose voice made you homesick even though you hated him bitterly just because he existed, who let you watch telly in his flat one long, hot miserable summer because you had no place else to go. He was also your guidance counselor who finally gave up on you because you refused to let him help you unkink your life. Joyce was your frazzled social worker who finally gave up one day and screamed at you, "Billy, you're a very bright kid and you're throwing it all away. Keep this up and you'll either wind up dead in a ditch or in prison" before asking that you be assigned to someone else. She was also Buffy's mother who even though she was terrified of you, still let you sit at her kitchen table drinking hot chocolate on the nights when her daughter was out, and talk, just talk. For that alone, you would have done anything she asked, but she never did.

_Tell me, which one is the truth?_

_You tell me, mate, I only work here!_

Xander was the kid you regularly beat up for his lunch money and shared a locker with in the eighth grade. Since when did he once have a hot ex-demon for a girl friend when the kid couldn't have gotten laid if he'd PAID?

_Tell me, which one is the truth?_

_You tell me, mate, I only work here!_

Dru was your sweet little doll loving half-sister whom you tried desperately to protect from your dad when he couldn't convince some skank to come home from the tavern with him on a Saturday night for a bit of in and out. How come she was also the love of your death and had two faces? One demonic and one angelic, both exquisitely insane as you danced with her in bed and through the world on a tide of blood, fire and jizz?

_Tell me, which one is the truth?_

_You tell me, mate, I only work here!_

Was the Initiative and what they did to you real? Or is it just that waste of human skin Billy telling fairy stories to explain why he's so fucked-up when the answer's really that he's a severely disturbed self-destructive little creep who'd be better off dead?

_Tell me, which one is the truth?_

_You tell me, mate, I only work here!_

You hate them. You really bloody hate them, the doctors. But you hate the Scoobies, you hate your Sire even more.

_We've never loved anybody but ourselves and since we never could tell the difference between love and hate, that's a moot point._

So, if any of them, and you mean ANY of them...

...ever came to visit though they don't know you're here...

And probably never will.

...you'd fall on your knees and...

...beg them...any soddin' one of them...even Xander...

...to take you home...

...wherever that is.


	2. Blue on Black

You want her.

You want her in the worst sort of way.

And she's perched on the counter like a butterfly in a brightly colored dress while you wash dishes, smiling at you.

She's petite, blonde, blue-eyed and ambitious.

She's nineteen and still in school.

And she's perched on the counter like a butterfly in a brightly colored dress while you wash dishes, smiling at you.

You're wearing a tomato sauce stained apron and up to your elbows in greasy water scraping the burnt lasagna out of the pan it was cooked in as you grow hard.

She comes from a good family.

She's in...she's in, what was it, pre-law?

She reminds you of someone you once loved a long time ago.

She even dresses similarly to that someone you once loved a long time ago.

Her name is Ava. She's perched on the counter like a butterfly in a brightly colored dress while you wash dishes, smiling at you.

Your heart's beating so loud that you can't even hear what Ava's saying to you as she swings her long legs with their slender ankles, heels drumming a light tattoo against the stainless steel cupboard door.

While you scrape burnt on lasagna from the pan that it was baked in as you grow hard.

You want Ava so bad but you have nothing to give her back in return because you just aren't what you used to be when you loved that someone else.

Except if you listen to your meds and the doctors that prescribed them after you wrapped your car around a bridge abutment three years ago, that someone else never existed. Vampires don't exist. Hellmouths? What's that? You're plain old Bill, the guy with the shuffling limp who mops the floor over at the Mall after hours, swabbing out toilets in the silence once the customers have gone home, lost in his own thoughts.

Trying to sort out what is real.

Today you think you've got a pretty good grasp of what's real; though for the last week or so things have been sliding around in your head like they do when you haven't been taking your meds. It's making you nervous because the last time you felt like this, you had a major flake-out and had to go back into the booby hatch for a month and you don't want to go through that again.

So you find yourself constantly telling yourself that Hellmouths aren't real. Paychecks are.

Vampires aren't real. Getting fired for sleeping on the job is.

The Slayer isn't. AA and NarcAnon meetings are.

That's what the meds and the doctors that prescribe them say, so it must be true.

So, right now at six o'clock sharp in the evening on a Friday night sometime in the middle of March, exact date unclear, you're plain ol' Billy, 26, recovering alcoholic and former heroin addict, slightly delusional, somewhat schizophrenic, medicated to the gills, high school dropout, severe diabetic, and incredibly, incredibly lonely, Billy.

Billy Tully. Crazy.

Billy Tully. With a limp.

Billy Tully. With a hard-on for something he can't have.

_You know you're Billy Tully because that's what it says on your California driver's license. It expired three years ago while you were involuntarily committed for babbling a lot of crap that you thought was true. About Hellmouths. About Vampires. About Slayers. You never bothered to renew the license with it's image of you, peroxided hair, eyes closed, sharp chinned you. _

_Hell, not that they would have granted you one anyway. Your condition makes you unfit to drive._

_So you take the bus._

_And walk._

_Everywhere._

Ava's perched on the counter like a butterfly in a brightly colored dress, smiling at you with that million dollar smile of hers, at the State run men's group home that you live in, watching you and your hard-on slowly clean up the communal kitchen because it's your turn to do so tonight and you've got sod else to do because it's your night off.

And you have nothing that you can give her in return.

_Try telling that to your body. Bodies are animals. Animals are optimists even when there's no chance in Hell. So you're hard. Which makes you an animal with nothing you can give her in return._

She's an alcoholic. Or so her therapist tells her. Two weeks ago she started attending the same late night AA meetings as you. You couldn't help but notice her. She's small, petite, blue eyed, blonde and ambitious.

Last night, she chose you to be her Sponsor.

_You think it was only because you were the youngest person there - the rest of the group is made up of burned out middle aged white men; dock workers, clerks, and retired factory people. You know, the ones that fall through the cracks, the ones that aren't interesting or ethnic enough for some liberal bleeding heart to start a crusade on behalf of._

Anyway, with the permission of Linda your therapist, you're supposed to be starting to guide Ava through the 12 Steps. You've been clean yourself for three years now, it's only right.

_Ava's perfume when she sat down next to you the first night overwhelmed you with the memories it carried within it. You nearly broke down right there and cried over losing something that was never yours to begin with; that never existed because the meds and the doctors that prescribe them say so. Instead, you settled for nervously smiling at her when she introduced herself and telling her your name without stuttering. "Billy, Billy Tully." _

_Because that's your name. Right? Billy Tully._

_So, what's Ava doing here?_

You didn't tell her where you lived. You only gave her your phone number when she asked you how she could get hold of you outside of the AA meetings; laboriously writing it down on a paper napkin before handing it to her, "C-c-c-c-call me aaaa-anytime, I-I'll m-meet y-you at th-the c-c-c-coffee shop on Third... ssss-ssss-street."

She immediately programmed it into her cell phone while you stood there feeling like an idiot, face flushed, ears burning. When she asked you for your number, she caught you without a rehearsed reply - you'd managed to control yourself around her for the last two weeks: sticking to monosyllable replies, nodding, smiling, letting her do all the talking. With one simple request from her, you'd blown any chance you might have had by sounding like a CD with a bad skip in it. So you steeled yourself for the inevitable, "Forget it!"

"Don't worry," Ava twinkled up at you against all expectations to the contrary, "I will!"

_You never told her where you lived because you were ashamed. Someone your age should have his own apartment, a house maybe, with a wife and kids, and not live in some group home with a bunch of fellow derelicts, looking forward to a menial job every night and watching television in the lounge all day when you can't sleep._

You're plain old Billy Tully and you have nothing you can offer her and yet here she is. She just showed up at the front door (locked) after parking her jaunty little red Miata across the street. Knocked on the door. Told Bob the guy who works the front desk that she's your cousin. Can she see you? He called Linda. It was o.k.

So, Bob called you in from the kitchen, coated up to the elbows with burnt lasagna (not your fault) and wearing your work clothes. Your other clothes are dirty because you forgot to do your laundry this week (your fault) because you've been too busy sorting the real from the unreal to notice things like an overflowing laundry bag behind the door to your room. She gave you an enthusiastic hug and kissed you on the cheek, "Billy, can we talk?"

The sudden blood rush to your crotch made it harder than usual to walk, making you grateful for the big greasy apron you were wearing. "Yeah." you managed to say, feeling the aftershock of her kiss on your face, "If you d-don't mind d-doing it in the kkkk-kitchen."

_That's another odd thing, the last week or so? You've been wanting sex again. Those wank-off magazines that you keep wrapped up in the remains of a blood stained black leather duster in the bottom of your footlocker? Well, just looking at the pictures and daydreaming aren't enough any more..._

Even though it was a lie, you signed her in without a quibble from stupid Bob who runs the front desk. She took your hand, tomato sauce and all, and let you lead her to the kitchen. Nobody makes an issue of it because lately you've been good. Besides, the kitchen's an open one - if something starts, the counselors, who are really orderlies in street clothes, can step in and stop it anytime they choose with restraints and a well-aimed hypo.

Ava's pissed off at her folks again. She couldn't wait to talk to you in person so she got out the reverse dialing directory that her dad keeps around the house and looked up your address. She was really that pissed off, she laughs, to go into his home office and look up your address because they've been hassling her about everything and when her folks hassle her, she wants to drink.

Fair enough. You remember you old man beating the shit out of you at the slightest provocation, and learning that if you poured enough of his Jack Daniels down your throat, the belt didn't hurt so much whenever he decided that you needed to learn a lesson. The more he beat you, the more you drank. The more you drank, the less you felt.

That was when you were seven.

_Hey, mate, how can we be so sure of that?_

Oh great, he's back. That other you who likes to mess with your head. You start to go limp.

He's been growing louder these last two weeks.

He puts a mental hand on your shoulder, leans into your ear, and whispers: _Personally, William me old son, I remember running starkers in and out of the surf at Brighton with me cousins when I was seven while my favorite cousin Beatrice minded us with one eye on a copy of Dante's Inferno. I had a little tin bucket and shovel and one of my other favorite cousin's old sailor hats to play with. Our mum sat way off on the boardwalk in a Bath chair because she had what they call these days "a nervous breakdown" and watched us play._

There's a nasty grin on his face. His teeth are filed to sharp cannibal points, so you say: _Go away, you aren't real._

You put up the last of the pans, drain the sink, scour it out, and dry your hands.

_You know we're being watched?_

_Go away, you aren't real._

The other men have left their rooms and cruise by, looking her over. Some make faces, gestures behind her back, gestures of approval, of... encouragement?

Most of them have girlfriends. You _don't._

_Ava's not our bird. Why would she want us? Bet we could have big fun with her anyway, pin her down, make her scream, rip out her throat, drink her blood as it spills out all over the bed?_

_Go away, you aren't real._

It feels good to see the looks of envy and approval on their faces as you help her down off of the counter with your left hand, the one missing most of the finger tips. Your right hand you stuff down in your trouser's pocket next to your returning hard-on. It's missing entire fingers; Ava shouldn't have to see or touch such a nasty thing.

The two of you move out into the lounge, but the television is on so loud that you can hardly hear each other.

So.

You invite.

Ava.

To your.

Room.

You've been good, so nobody stops you.

_As long as we leave the door open, that is._

That's the problem with the other you, he follows you everywhere. Doors and privacy don't mean anything to this asshole.

_Go away, you aren't real._

There's a television, a small one that you don't turn on very often because the one in the lounge is better, a hard, narrow bed with a footlocker at the end of it, a mirror that you spend hours in front of looking at what's left of you because the other you tells you that you weren't always able to see yourself in it, never mind what the meds and the doctors that prescribe them tell you, and two posters.

One is of Bela Lugosi in Dracula drag, posturing.

The other is Big Ben at sundown.

You bought them with your first paycheck a month after your doctors let you move out of the booby hatch and start getting reacquainted with the world. They caught your eye in the window of a used bookstore that you always pass on your way to work. Come payday, you bought them. You walked out of the shop with them under your arm feeling odd. Maybe it was because you were born in London before they shipped you to your old man in backwoods Mississippi and maybe you once saw Big Ben when you were very small. Maybe it was because Bela and you had something in common. You were both druggies, and you thought you had once been a vampire while he once played one in a black and white movie that your other self tells you saw the night it was first released in 1931, your best girl sitting next to you after you fed off of the people in the seats around you. It was the funniest movie that either one of you had ever seen because you knew...

_...the real Dracula. That bastard still owes us money and isn't half as cool as Bela was that night, all big black cape and fangs. But the meds and the doctors that prescribe them tell us that the last part is a lie, riiiiiiiiight W-w-willie?_

_Go away, you aren't real. And it's Billy, by the way._

Ava looks at both posters as you usher her into your room with its sparse personal items and giggles.

"The parantal figures sent me to London last Christmas. The shopping was fantastic! Ever been to England, Willy?"

"B-Billy. I was b-born there, so they t-tell me. Don't remember it m-much. My old man was from Missi-sssss-ssss...d-down South. When my mother d-died of an overd-dose, they sh-shshshipped me to him." is all you manage to get out as you offer her the single hard chair that came with the room, sitting on the bed in front of her. "W-what's England like these d-days?"

So Ava goes on, telling you about the wonders of Harrod's, Bond Street, and the hundreds of little dress shops that she raided. You let her voice wash over you; it makes the room seem less grey while the fake memories trickle unasked for back into your head - you and Dru window shopping on the Portabello Road in 1965, smashing windows, killing shopkeepers, taking whatever caught your fancy, and even earlier, being measured for your first grown up suit with long pants in Saville Row when you were sixteen back in 189- The meds and the doctors who prescribe them tell you that you left London when you were seven and that your earliest memories are of a filthy little flat with rat droppings and broken hypodermics and spoons all over the floor where your mother lies dead and smiling in a corner with an elastic band still around one arm.

And Dru was your beloved little half-sister that your father molested in front of you no matter how hard you tried to protect her.

_Oh for God's... mum didn't die of heroin, we killed her with a sharp stick! When we were 22, remember? and dead as a doornail ourselves. Should have done it sooner, but we didn't have the wrinklies back then._

_Go away, you aren't real._

_Dru isn't our sister any more than this bint flutterin' 'round our cage's our cousin! We have no family. The closest thing we have left to family obviously hates us so much that they've abandoned us, just like our sister, who isn't our sister, who stood there and watched us kill our mo..._

_Shut up!_

This brings you up short. You shake your head violently at the confusion of overlapping images. "You okay?" Ava asks.

"Long d-day. Sorry, d-d-didn't mean to drop off on-on y-you." You stammer. "G-go on, I'm l-listening."

"Like really? I'm not boring you?"

"No, not at all." you carefully reply.

She goes on to tell you about her day trip to Paris on Christmas Eve while visiting London; of the Chunnel, of the things she bought within sight of the Eiffel Tower with her Daddy's money, and how pretty the lights were. You on the other hand spent last Christmas Eve sprawled out on your bed in a pair of ratty boxers, nursing a tepid diet Cherry Coke that you wished was bourbon with your booted feet up on the nightstand while reading a dogeared copy of _The Collected Works of Emily Dickenson_ while waiting for the dryer buzzer to go off across the hall in the communal laundry room. That was when that other you, the sarcastic one who's bugging you now, convinced you to refuse your meds because he said you didn't need them, had never needed them, and that they were poisoning you so that you had to go back into the booby hatch by New Year's because you were babbling and delusional all over again.

_At least they got the seizures under control. Can't have us writhing around on the floor like a chopped in two snake, can we? Just not dignified!_

_Go away, you aren't real._

"Ooooh, pictures. I love pictures!" Ava gets up and leans past you to get a look at the battered photos, a small handful of them that you used to keep in your wallet that are now taped to your wall beside your pillow so that you can lie there and look at them when you can't sleep - which is most of the time, "Is this your family? Is that your mom? Are those your sisters? No, they can't be, they don't look like you. Is that one your girlfriend?" she adds coyly, looking at you from the corner of her eye.

You lean over to look, catching a sweet glimpse of vanilla cleavage. Ava's found the picture of a blonde woman, middle aged but in good shape and a slender redhead with humorous green eyes who has her arm around the waist of a curvy strawberry blonde who looks embarrassed to be in a bikini. In front of them, sharing a dribbly ice cream cone is a little brunette who's making a face at another blonde who looks like she could be her sister. Behind them is the endless blue Pacific. "N-no, just some p-people I once knew."

The meds and the doctors who prescribe them tell you that the woman's name is Joyce. She was your social worker back when you attended high school in some podunk California town before you dropped out/got expelled at sixteen. The redhead is her daughter's best friend despite the fact that she was one of the geekiest people in your class. Joyce's daughter's the other blonde; the brunette's her bratty but nice little sister who occasionally let you sit next to her on the school bus - you had a hopeless crush on the eldest one long before you realized that Joyce was her mother. When you saw the picture peeking out at you from an envelope on Joyce's desk, you pocketed it when she left her office to get something...

_No, _the other you insists, you know, the one that won't leave you alone?_ Joyce was that blonde's mother all right. She was incredibly kind to us one summer before her bitch of a daughter broke our heart. You stole the picture from their house one night after Joyce died of a brain tumor because you didn't want to forget her._

"Shut up." You say. Ava looks at you, startled, "Just thinking ab-about m-my boss."

"Right," she says, "Like me with my mom and dad!" She loses her balance, falling against you. You steady her, feeling like your fly is going to burst open. Your bad hip betrays you, painfully spasming so that you both wind up on the hard grey linoleum floor with her on top.

The two of you pause for what feels like forever.

Then Ava kisses you.

The room with its putty colored cinder block walls disappears.

From a distance you feel your hands gliding up and down Ava's back as her tongue entwines with yours while her soft body presses...

Someone clears his throat loudly.

"B-bloody Hell!" the two of you sit up guiltily.

It's Fat Dan the meds man. Fuck.

You hate Fat Dan with a dull, flat loathing.

You hate what he brings with him every so many hours even more.

He's one of the visible bars in your invisible cage.

He's what keeps you and the rest of the men who live here sane.

Right now, you aren't so sure that in your case it's working.

Fat Dan's cheerful. Not a real cheerful, but a grating, saccharine kind of cheerful. He loves his job. He bustles around with his meds cart as you stand up, humiliated by the rapidly diminishing bulge in your crotch and the small paper cup full of pills he hands you along with a larger one of water. You pause, looking at them before you toss them back, washing them down with what's in the other cup. "William, it's been two hours, you need to test yourself. I have the lancet and the meter all ready to go. Don't mind me young lady, just doin' the Lord's work." He taps you on the chin. Obediently you open your mouth to prove that you actually swallowed them because you've been known not to. He sticks one rubber gloved finger into your mouth and runs it around the insides of your cheeks. You'd like to bite him, but you know better now.

Fat Dan finds nothing and makes a note on his clip board, "You should be grateful that the Lord has seen to it that your friend is being so well cared for here. But if I were you, young lady, I'd pray for His forgiveness tonight because it's a sin to lie, right William?"

Great, Fat Dan's also Born Again and won't leave you alone about it either.

_If his God's so merciful and kind, why the hell didn't He let us die the night we drove our car into that bridge abutment? _

_Go away, you aren't real._

You take the lancet and meter from Fat Dan, turn your back on your guest, and roll up your sleeve, embarrassed to let Ava see you take a reading because she'll see the railroad tracks on the inside of your arms and know that you're also a recovering junkie.

The spring loaded lancet stings the back of your right arm. You catch the tiny bead of blood up on the end of the test strip, wait for the countdown: 10. 9. 8...

230. Damn. Next thing you'll know they'll be cutting off your feet. You go completely flaccid, breaking out in a cold sweat.

Sizzling in your own sugar, you close your eyes briefly before you hand the meter back to Dan who makes a notation on a clipboard with your name on it before handing you a disposable syringe and a gauze pad soaked in alcohol.

You walk out into the hall, Dan on your heels to make sure that you actually do it. You lift your grey work shirt; the one that the janitorial service you work for has provided you as part of the bennies, pinch the pale skin of your belly between the fingers of one hand, and swipe at it with the pad before inserting the needle with the other. You look up. Ava's standing there in front of you, leaning over all big eyed and fascinated.

"Does that hurt?" she asks.

You blush, "N-no. You...you get used to it after a while." Heroin was that way too only it made you feel better. Getting caught shooting up in the employee lounge got you fired so you took your last paycheck from that shitty job and got so drunk that you...

_...woke up on the operating table convinced that the Initiative had gotten its hooks back in us so that in our terror we flipped off of the surface, and tried to run away only our hip was so badly crushed that all we could do was lie there and scream in a pool of our own blood at the feet of the doctors and nurses in their masks and scrubs. _

_Who's the Initiative?_

_Nobody you'd want to know, mate!_

_Go away, you aren't real._

You work the plunger, feeling the frigid heat of the insulin spreading out beneath your skin, wishing it was heroin.

You then put the gauze pad over where needle meets flesh, before withdrawing it and dropping your shirt. Dan holds out a container marked "Biohazard" and you place the pad and the empty syringe after bending the needle in half against the wall. Fat Dan makes another note on his clipboard. As he puts the clipboard away, he tells you "Curfew in one hour - don't forget to pray!" as he bustles off to the next room, fat ass wobbling with every jaunty step.

You really, _really_ hate Fat Dan. You'd like to kill him, to feel his fat neck snap between what's left of your hands, to feel his cheerfulness drain out of his blobby body like so much stale piss, to hear his carcass hit the floor like a sack of wet shit, but it's just too much trouble.

Ava takes your hand and leads you back into your room, closing the door behind you. This is a major no-no, but right now you don't care.

"S-sorry you had to s-s-s-see that." You manage to get out, rubbing at the scar on your temple, a souvenir of where you went head first through a windshield three years ago and look away.

To your surprise Ava removes your glasses before she unbuttons your shirt, one slow movement at a time. All you can do is lean against the door in blurry surprise. She kisses where you just shot up, "Better now?"

"Mmm." you say noncommittally, pleasantly distracted by the violent return of your erection. Ava smiles as she leads you to the bed.

She pulls you down before you can protest, not that you want to. "W-wait." you manage to get out, and you spit out the one pill you managed to chipmunk. The others you need, but you don't like going to sleep so hard you can't defend yourself, so you try not to take these every chance you get.

"What's that?" Ava takes the pill from you. It's already starting to dissolve.

"Sleeping pill."

She giggles, handing it back to you, "Way to go!" You secrete it along with the other ten you've managed to horde behind the plastic baseboard. One of these days, you'll take them all, and never wake up. Won't that be nice?

You nod before you kiss her, one hand slipping beneath her skirt while the other turns out the little bedside light imbedded in the wall so you can't hang yourself with the cord.

Ava doesn't protest.

Instead she helps you out of your trousers, your shirt, your boots, everything even as you unwrap her like a gift, silk dress, bra, panties, garters... where they all become one big out of focus puddle on the floor...

Her hands rest briefly on your hip, manicured nails lightly tracing the harsh keloid scars where the steering column crushed it, "C-car c-crash."

"So that's why you limp." You nod against Ava's neck, breathing in the perfume of her hair, tasting the delicate layer of sweat on her soft skin. "Looks like you got lucky and missed the best part." Her hand lingers on your cock, tugging gently at your foreskin all pulled back like a turtleneck - you gasp, arching your back as she kisses you, "I've never done one like this before, what's it do?"

You catch your breath before whispering in her ear, "L-let me show you." as your hands greedily explore Ava's trim backside and belly, lingering in the crisp curls of her pubic hair. It's been months. You've tried prostitutes, but it doesn't feel the same. And there's disease. You want to die, but not from AIDS.

_Funny, _your other self smirks,_ that didn't used to be an issue when we were dead._

_Go away, you aren't real._

You ease down on top of Ava, using your good hip to push in between her thighs. Trembling, you just rest there for a long time, enjoying the feel of your skin against hers, trying to ignore the growing ache in what's left of the bad one. Her pelvis rises, you slide in as she twines her legs around yours. It feels so good you come right there like some green kid. It's so intense that your eyes roll back in your head and you can't breathe for a second.

"S-sorry." You slide off and sit down on the chair, shoulders hunched with humiliation. You're 26 for God's sake, this isn't supposed to happen! "S-sorry."

_No, that other one smirks again, you're over a century old and this isn't supposed to happen. I thought Dru taught you better, but I guess not._

_Shut up! _you scream silently._ Dru's my sister, and I never did my sister. Dad did, but I didn't! That's what the meds and the doctors who prescribe them tell me!_

_Dru isn't our sister. Ask the pills who she is the next time you see them. You'll find out I'm right, _your other self sneers. _Soddin' pathetic is what you are. Serve you right if she gets pissed and abandons us just like Buffy did because you weren't man enough for her._

_Shut up! Shutup Shutup ShutupShutupShutupShut up!_

Ava doesn't. Instead she gets up and straddles you where you sit, caressing your bad hip, wrapping her long legs around your waist while reaching down between your thighs and teasing you back up so that you lose yourself within her.

Afterwards, the two of you lie there on your hard, narrow bed beneath the thin blanket that the home supplies you with, gently kissing her shoulders and neck as you listen to her breathe.

No, you're back in a basement somewhere and a little voice inside you is telling you that you're going to die. The person you hold against your still dead heart is going to kill you and you'll thank her for the privilege even though she never loved you half as much as you did her.

_The pills tell me this is a lie._

_Wrong, pouf._ The other you corrects, _the pills are a lie, and that basement is the truth. We once died for someone who didn't love us as much as we loved her. Billy Tully is a lie. Bill Tully is a lie. William Tully is maybe a lie. We died the first time in 1880, rising from our grave like a homicidal crocus a few nights later. Dru was there and she fed us, she fed us the same Whitechapel whore you'd gone to a few days before and failed to get off with. Then she deflowered you on the still cooling body._

_You're insane!_

_That's what they tell us, _the other you sneers, _what do you think? Me? Well, mate, a man doesn't forget his first time..._

...you'd somehow convinced Buffy the snotty cheerleader, Joyce's daughter, to do it with you at the Homecoming Bonfire. She was tipsy on a beer and a half, and you weren't - by the time you were seventeen, you could down a bottle of Jack without anybody being the wiser. You convinced her to come with you to an abandoned house on the bad side of town. You did it on a dirty mattress in what was left of the kitchen, nervous because she was your ideal, nervous because for all your experience with the loser girls that you drew like a magnet into your orbit she made you feel like it was your first time and you nearly came all over yourself just thinking about it. She passed out half way through; you lay there just like you are now, smelling the perfume in her hair, pretending that she was yours, but knowing that she belonged to someone else... that was about the time the house decided to collapse and the two of you nearly didn't make it out alive...

_The what, the house collapsed? I don't remember that!_

_You're pathetic, Willy. Yeah, the house collapsed, but she was too old to be a cheerleader - she was out of high school. And it wasn't you that took her, she took you! Gobbled us up and spat us out, is what she did! And we liked it too, only you're too crazy and broken to interest her now should she ever decide to come and rescue us - which is all your fault because you're such a loser!_

_Huh? Don't remember that, don't remember that at all! Shut up!_

_Not surprised with the amount of bone they had to pull out of our nut - yeah, brilliant move there Spike!_

_Who's Spike?_

_That's us, you idiot! Brilliant move, Spike, because that's us, go out- go out, get smashed and forget that we aren't what we used be, and crash head long into a bridge, leavin' us a soddin' pathetic half-vegetable loony. Sometimes I don't know why we even bother! Now you've got us locked up in some warehouse for half-men where we can't escape and have nowhere to go even if we did because the second we stop taking our meds, we're toast! We're flopping 'round on the floor foamin' at the mouth toast! Thanks to you, even Buffy wouldn't want us the way we are!_

_Who's Buffy?_

_What the bloody...have you been listening to me at all? That other you snarls and mentally smacks you on the back of the head. The same damned drugs that keep us going are turning our brains into oatmeal. What have you done to us? You aren't Billy Tully, loser extraordinaire, you were born in 1858 and you died when you were twenty two in an alleyway after that cunt Cecily ripped our heart out with her tongue! Vampires are real! You should know; we were one for over a century until that bitch Buffy saw to it that we lost everything and became her unwanted lap dog!_

_I'm 26. I was born in London. My mother was a heroin addict. My father abused me. A foster father molested me, I have a half-sister..._

_Shut the fuck up, that's just the pills talking!_

_Shut up! Shut up! Shut up Shut up ShutupShutupShutupShutup!_

_Buffy forced us to go out and get our soul back - some prize that was. We went out and got our soul back and she still didn't love us. She loved Angel - he had a soul. Why couldn't she forget him and love us? And after she killed us down in the Hellmouth, you didn't have the wrinklies to go and claim her after that bastard Lindsey resurrected us - coward!_

_Shut up! Shut upShut upShut upShut upShut upShut up! Shut up! Shut upShut upShut upShut upShut upShut up!_

_Failure! Nancy boy! Poofter! You can't make anybody happy! You couldn't satisfy Dru, you couldn't satisfy Buffy. What makes you think that you can make this little bit of veal all cuddled up to your heart happy?_

_Shut up! Shut upShut upShut upShut upShut upShut up!Shut up! Shut upShut upShut upShut upShut upShut up!Shut up! Shut upShut upShut upShut upShut upShut up!Shut up! Shut upShut upShut upShut upShut upShut up! _

Oh God! Did you just shriek that out loud? You feel your body begin to convulse, your eyes roll back into your head, but it's not an orgasm. She screams with a tinny echo that smears across your senses, but you can still hear that other you and he's laughing.

He's laughing at you...

Cell phone conversation overheard in the dressing room of an undisclosed Abercrombie & Fitch:

"...yeah? It's him all right...uh-huh...if you hadn't shown me his picture before the accident, I wouldn't have bothered... Why do your bosses want to know about him anyway? He's a fuckin' vegetable! I mean, like, he can move around... there's nothing left! Even after you bribed his doctors and therapist to...placebos... over the last few weeks before I interviewed him...I don't think there's any use for him. Get this, he doesn't even recognize pictures of his old girlfriend, he really thinks he's Billy Tully! Uh, try him out? What? Oh yeah, eewwwww...came all over me -thank God he shut up. It would have been like screwing Porky Pig. Yes, I was careful! What do you think I am? I'm tired of pretending to be an alcoholic. All those ishy old men staring at me...all right, I'll go to a couple more AA meetings... Don't let anybody know about this? There might be a use for him one of these days? He's still pretty, like a Ken doll somebody smashed with a hammer... if he wasn't so creepy with those eyes...it's like someone else is looking out of them at me. No, he's crazy...good in the sack, once you get him to chill out, though... you were right...stamina!

...uh-huh.

...uh-huh.

...uh-huh.

...oh! Evie, be a good big sis' for me and tell daddy that I dented the Miata again? Kiss-kiss and C-ya!"


	3. Bitter Sugar

"There are women who will roll in shit for a fur coat..."  
- Barbara Streisand, _Nuts_

"The quality of your life is dictated by the quality of the people you let into it."  
- Jeff, a plumber who occasionally wears a kilt

* * *

**Sharks and Remoras**

_Oh God. What have I done?_

Numbly you sit staring out from behind the bars of the prison that's your own drugged body while total strangers debate whether or not you're competent enough to stand trial or need to be locked up for good in the Minnesota Security Hospital because you're dangerous to everyone including yourself.

_Oh God. What have I done?_

Your wrists are shackled to your ankles and you're wearing an orange jumpsuit with a number over your heart because you didn't have the energy to change into the shabby second hand suit that you've been advised to wear. Your hair hangs lank and matted in your eyes.

_Oh God. What have I done?_

Next to you sits the harassed looking woman who's your court appointed attorney. You're her fifth case of the morning and she's on her sixth cup of coffee. You can't remember her name. Fair enough, she keeps calling you "Bobby". Great, you've already sampled the hospitality of the St. Peter's Regional Treatment Center off and on for the last three and a half years. With this woman M.S.H. seems a dead cert. Not that prison'd be any better.

_Oh God. What have I done?_

Across the aisle your wife, Ava and her fiancé, Nellie Scuggs, no Gaia, sit next to their lawyer, a sleek woman in a tailored suit.

_Oh God. What have I done?_

Up on the bench, the judge, a man with a face like a letter box sorts through the papers in front of him. You don't know his name either. When everybody rose and the bailiff called out his name before telling everyone to sit down, you still didn't catch it. The high pitched ringing in your ears from your meds drowned out the bailiff's voice.

_Oh God. What have I done?_

Nellie, no Gaia, glares over at you, pimply face triumphant. Her mouth still looks like a rotten plum someone stepped on, and your left hand aches from where you punched her not long ago. They haven't removed the stitches from your knuckles from where her teeth sliced into them even as they were knocked from their cradles of meat and bone...

_Oh God. What have I done?_

Your wife leans against Gaia. Gaia has one pudgy arm around her shoulders while her free hand clutches greedily at Ava's pregnant belly. Ava doesn't even bother to look at you; she's too busy looking at Gaia.

_Oh God. What have I done?_

The bailiff calls up Eva's lawyer. She walks confidently towards the stand. Through your meds you catch her saying, "...my client and her fiancé have been extremely traumatized by this man..."

_It wasn't supposed to be this way._

If only you had taken a different route back to the men's group home you used to live at on your long walk back from work that morning. If you'd come by five minutes later, you never would have seen Ava go into the abortion clinic, passing the ever-present picketers as she went. Some doctor with a blade or a saline wash would have ended it; you never would have known.

_And we could have gotten on with what was left of our life._

But no, you saw her, you called her name, "A-ava, w-w-wait up!" and limped over to her, wanting to know what was going on. You hadn't seen her for four months, not since you had that humiliating breakdown where the orderlies had to drag you naked and screaming off of her because your doctor reduced your meds without telling you a few days before so that thepills that keep you from flying apart in all directions weren't there to hold you together in one semi-piece. By the time they'd stabilized you and fired your doctor for negligence, Ava'd disappeared from the AA meetings and she wasn't answering your phone calls.

_There she was, on the steps of the abortion clinic, just barely showing, but we knew mate, ohhhhh we knew._

You talked Ava as best you could into sitting down with you in a nearby diner. She wouldn't look at you, but you didn't care because she was so beautiful and you thought you loved her and remembering that one brief, sweet illicit time with her was one of the few things that kept you from going completely insane even as you were beating your head on the padded walls.

_It was ours._

How did she know?

You were the only one she'd been with without protection for months.

_We should have known!_

You asked her, no, you begged her not to terminate.

Ava said she'd made up her mind. She didn't want to be a mother. She had ambitions; a child would only get in the way.

_I, we, should have listened and walked away but we never learn, do we?_

Though you didn't know the first thing about babies you told her that you'd take care of the kid so she could get on with her life, please, please, just don't abort.

_Remember when a child's life meant nothing to us?_

She said she'd think about it.

You sat back, relieved, frightened, and...

_...happy. Mate, we did something that we'd never done before! For all our boneheaded stupidity, we've never managed to knock anybody up, and here we'd finally done it, with a beautiful girl with a million dollar smile who reminds us so much of that bitch cheerleader who despised us but always kicked us in the teeth the day after._

**Bride**

She called you at the halfway house the next morning. She'd decided not to abort.

You met at the coffee shop fifteen minutes later. You'd come as close to running as your bad leg would let you.

She smiled at you and you thought your heart would break so you asked her carefully.

_No. We handed her a note that simply asked, "Will you?" because we knew that if we said it out loud our blaring stuttering voice would break the spell and she'd walk out on us as she had every right to._

You'd spent half the night composing this note over and over again in your head, finally writing it down and stuffing it in your back pocket at dawn before walking home from work..

She returned it to you and said, "Yes."

_She didn't have to. Women these days don't have to - they get a baby and walk off from the father like they'd just got a tank full of gas at the local Quickie Mart without looking backwards - nobody cares. It wasn't like that when we were little and the G.I. what was our dad married our English mum when she and her mother showed up at the front gate of the Army Post he was stationed at in England, claiming he was "the barstard what got me lit'l girl pregger"s. That's what my birth certificate, my therapist and the pills that she prescribes tell me._

That afternoon you went down to the courthouse with Ava. After coughing up a fee and signing a few papers, that was it.

You had a wife.

You had a child on the way.

And you had no money.

You didn't care because you now had a wife and a child, which was more than you'd started the day with.

_You mean we were too busy being happy to notice Nellie, no, Gaia hovering around the edges, spotty face like a thunderstorm, giving us the evil eye? _

**Nellie**

Ava tolerated Gaia hanging 'round though you had no idea why. She was big, fat, ugly, and smelled bad. She was also a terrible dresser, refusing to wear a bra so that her heavy breasts sagged somewhere down around her non-existent waistline because "bras were a malevolent patriarchal restraint on her femininity". She refused to bathe, stating flatly when you asked while standing upwind, that "Bathing was another patriarchal restraint calculated to make women sick because it killed the beneficial bacteria on their skins." Ava, always stylishly dressed, contrasted against Gaia, making Gaia look ten times worse, but Gaia hung around anyway like some large, smelly unwanted dog.

**Honeymoon**

That night Gaia hogged the white leather couch in the living room of the apartment that you and Ava now shared, snarling at you like you were some sort of intruder when she wasn't bitching at Ava for having a LEATHER couch when she could have a clear conscience and have one made of animal friendly, non-exploitative organically grown hemp.

_We told Gaia to leave. It was after all, our wedding night and two's company, three's a crowd unless it's an adult movie. Friend of Ava's or not, we didn't fancy her 'round for it. _

Gaia jeered at you, mocking your stutter, calling you a filthy MAN. Anyway, it was Ava's apartment, you had no right to throw her out, you oppressive representative of the Caucasian patriarchy!

Ava came out of the bedroom and gave Gaia a sweetly melting smile before ordering her to get her stinky ass the hell out.

Gaia gave Ava a stricken look as she left in a hurry.

_We should have known right then what was going on..._

**Loser**

You later saw Gaia standing outside in the mean glare of the parking lot security lights, looking up at Ava's bedroom window, tears running down her puggish face. It was three a.m.

Gaia-bitch shouldn't have worried. Ava locked us out of the bedroom we thought we'd be sharing with her and told us to go sleep in the spare bedroom because she was too tired to deal with us right now. We were stupid enough not to question it because, well, she was pregnant.

**Garden Path**

The next day Ava told you that if you were going to be her husband, you had to look the part. You told her that you didn't have any money, but if she waited 'til Friday when you got paid, after the different liens had been taken out for the property damage and medical bills that you'd accumulated from your accident, you and Goodwill Industries might be able to come to an agreement. She gave you an impatient look and told you that she was going to cover that, just come on, let's go.

_She bought us clothes, better clothes than what we could ever afford on our own. Nothing too faggy, nothing too queer, but enough to tell anybody who bothered to look that we were just one more accessory of hers, a man shaped accessory instead of a pair of high heels, a matching handbag, a rhinestone hair clip... it was humiliating. We should have been buying her nice things, for her and our kid, but she said don't bother. That should have told us something but we weren't listening, eh Billy?_

Then she ordered you to go get a real haircut, standing beside the stylist the whole time, telling him exactly how she wanted it done.

_Ava dressed us up like a soddin' Ken doll to her Barbie. We let ourselves fall for it because we thought it meant she loved us. She hated our night-shift pale skin and paid for us to spend time baking like a potato in a bloody tanning bed until we were dark enough to suit her. When that didn't work, she had us stained. She didn't like our hair even after she paid $100 dollars to have it cut. So she had it chemically straightened and bleached until it was more to her taste. We let her because we thought it meant she loved us. She told us to lose the glasses and paid to have us fitted with contacts that gave us headaches because our eyesight was so poor that the lenses couldn't fully correct our vision. We obeyed her because we thought it meant she loved us. She told us to keep our mouth shut in public and let her do all the talking. We kept our mouth shut because we thought it meant she was sparing us the embarrassment of sounding like a CD with a bad skip in it._

_And we looked good. Bloody good. Dangerous good - as long as we kept our mouth shut. _

At the parties Ava threw every week, you were catnip to a bunch of people whose biggest adventure in life so far had been getting stuck on the ski lift at Aspen for a whole hour before the attendant could get them down safe to hot chocolate and Thai Stick while soaking off the fright in the Jacuzzi that came with the condo. Frat boys wearing Abercrombie & Fitch came up to you while you stood there in sleeveless shirts that displayed your jailhouse tats and heroin scars; trying to get you to spar with them while bragging about their schoolboy exploits on the football field as their girlfriends looked you over, wondering if the marriage, as sudden as it was, was open enough for you to give them a tumble because you smelled enticingly of the streets.

Casually leaning against something to spare your leg, you'd give them a slow smile, showing just enough teeth to give them a slight thrill, as you made non-committal noises that they interpreted as something hinting of undesirable desires fulfilled.

_What a load of old shit!_

**Pantomime**

Ava put on quite a show when you were in public. On campus, at parties; your wife couldn't keep her hands off you while Gaia stabbed you with her eyes. Funny, that, whenever Gaia-sow was stinking up the place, you could pretty much count on getting the physical contact and attention from you wife that you craved almost as much as heroin or booze.

_Bloody hell! In private we were something to be tossed into the back of Ava's closet with last year's shoes, belts, and purses. When we objected, when we tried to be her husband, when we tried to have some things our way, all Ava had to do was mention the clinic...oh God, why did we let her do this to us?_

(Behind you Rachel leans forward, putting a reassuring hand on your shoulder. You reach one shaking frostbitten, bandaged hand up and try to take it, ears still ringing.)

**Rachel**

Rachel, plump, kind, Rachel. She was Cathe's girlfriend of thirty five years. Cathe and Rachel lived across the hall from you and Ava, watching as the two of you ate each other alive, with Gaia flavoring the stew you were in with her own special venom. They found you a month ago after the cops showed up and pinned you screaming to the pavement for harassing some poor woman who reminded you of your half-sister, Drusilla.

You'd been eating out of garbage cans and sleeping in doorways in the freezing Minnesota autumn, blood sugar yo-yoing as your left hand throbbed and swelled from where Gaia's teeth had shredded your knuckles. After coaxing you into the back of the ambulance, Rachel sat with you on the ride and then in the emergency room, holding your hand as you wept and raved because the restraints reminded you of far too many times when strangers did things to you against your will. After you were cleaned up and stabilized, Cathe took the time to explain the charges: assault, battery, and general breaking of probation that your wife, Gaia and that woman had brought against you.

**Cathe**

Cathe was a tall, rangy ex-cop with a hawkish profile that you mistook for a man the first time you saw her as she sat down next to you on the hood of Ava's little red Miata while inside Ava's apartment the usual TGIF party raged.

You looked over at him, no her, puzzled. Without preamble she said, "You're on probation and wanna stay that way." as she lit a cheroot. She puffed at it contemplatively before handing it to you.

You nodded, nervously taking a drag , "I can tell," she continued, "It's in your eyes. Now you're mixed up with those cannibals. If you don't run now, you'll wind up in the clink while they walk away scot-free as usual because they've got money and you don't." She spat onto the sidewalk before taking the cheroot back from you. "I've been watching that little Anne Heche wannabe – she's ambitious."

Remembering Ava's threats, you shrugged, making a noncommittal noise. Cathe looked at you and then up at the windows from which poured assorted party noises, and then back at you. Her iron grey crewcut glinted in the parking lot lights. "Ava gets a street-flavored boyfriend. What's in it for you?"

You looked at her, one eyebrow silently quirked before holding up your left hand, displaying the plain gold band on your third finger which was sandwiched in between the two heavy silver rings that Ava'd handed to you before the party started this evening. You'd snarled at her; having a bunch of drunken frat boys and their girlfriends invade your home seemingly every other day was getting old fast, but you put them on anyway.

"Husband? Now that's interesting." You let your hand fall, shrugging, giving a half smile. As bad as things were between you and Ava at the moment, you still thought that you loved her.

"She picking up the tab?"

You gave a curt nod.

Cathe blew out a lazy stream of smoke, eyeballing you. "Let me guess, Ava's only keeping you around to make someone jealous."

You frowned, who? So far you hadn't noticed... no, not her, not Gaia. She was too dirty, too smelly... and the way Ava acted around her male guests...

Something must have registered on your face. Cathe passed back the cheroot, "Nellie's been following Ava around for the last six months like a bitch in heat. I've been a cop for over thirty five years - I'm not stupid, your wife's playing dirty games."

Cop? Your feet started to sweat as you stood there staring at Cathe, but it wasn't fear. At Ava's Wednesday night "Hump" party, you'd angrily slammed two six packs followed by a whole bottle of Jack on an empty stomach because you no longer cared about breaking probation or how that shit might mix with your meds after the fight you and Ava'd had that morning over something dumb like why didn't she want to share her bed with you? After all, you were married; it's what married people did.

So you'd spent the last two days feeling headachy and weird while throwing up at even the slightest thought of eating, not that there was all that much to eat in Ava's place anyway. Beyond a well-stocked liquor cabinet and six kegs in the pantry, your wife's idea of a home cooked meal was to order takeout. Right now she was so mad at you for sicking it up all over the side of the white leather couch where Gaia usually squatted yesterday morning that she was eating on campus before she came home so you had to fend for yourself. Today you hadn't eaten anything beyond a half-bowl of stale peanuts and the remains of a two-liter bottle of Pepsi for breakfast, which left you even queasier and more foul tempered so that you'd pointedly walked out on tonight's weekly TGIF party because you were in no mood to deal with her rich asshole friends.

The open air helped. Sort of.

"Ava's knocked up. You the father?" Cathe asked in a voice that told you that she already knew the answer.

You looked away, remembering how this morning's spat had ended almost as soon as it'd started when Ava threatened to abort if you didn't do exactly as she said. Furious, you'd called in and quit your job out at the Airport for W&H Janitorial - all because one of her friends had casually mentioned seeing you out there pushing a mop on her way back from a weekend in the Bahamas. You'd spent the rest of the day angrily trying to figure out a legal way to come up with enough money to pick up the part of the cost of your meds and insulin that Medicaid didn't cover as well as meet the minimum payment on the debts incurred from your accident three years ago so you didn't have to go to jail now that you were unemployed.

Cathe frowned and looked back up at the windows of Ava's condo. "Sure it's yours?"

Hesitantly you nodded. The helpless rage that you felt this morning was back.

Cathe gave a short, hard laugh, "Not many'd care, but you do. Why is that, Billy?"

You leaned back on your elbows, feeling the ever-present slight tremor in your hands beginning to speed up. It wasn't just anger; you could feel your blood sugar beginning to drop. Your diabetes shit was in your room but you didn't want to face the crowd invading Ava's condo and this ex-cop who knew your name was bugging you. You wanted to blow her off and walk away because if you didn't eat something pretty soon without throwing up, you'd do something stupid. All it would take to set you off completely was one more wanker bragging about how when he was a little kid he used to steal grapes from the supermarket by eating them, or one more scornful jab from Gaia who was sitting on the brand new white leather couch that had been delivered this morning, mimicking your stutter every time you told her to "S-s-s-sod off!"

"How much have you had tonight?"

Controlling your temper, you shook your head "no" while looking at the ground between the toes of your Doc Martins to steady yourself. All you'd had tonight were the tabs you'd scored randomly on the way out the door for company, but her cop's voice made you hedge a little out of habit.

"You're high." You shook your head again before you pulled out the medical alert tag that you wore around your neck on a silver chain and vaguely waved it at this strange, annoying woman who asked too many questions. "Jesus Christ, you're diabetic!" Cathe steadied you as your knees buckled, causing you to lean heavily against her when the world began to lurch and heave underfoot.

Angry and confused, you tried to break away. "Get back here cowboy, you're coming with me!" Cathe rapped out while gripping you by the shoulders as she hustled you into the building as fast as your bad leg would allow. Once out of the elevator, she unlocked the door of the apartment across the hall from Ava's before kicking it open with her foot. "Rachel, we got a situation here!" she yelled, "Get my spare kit and that unopened bottle of glucose tablets out of my bedside table!"

**Rachel, Again**

Next thing you knew you were sitting with your head down between your knees in a brightly lit kitchen that couldn't be Ava's because it smelled of pot roast. Ava's never smelled of pot roast. A roly-poly little woman with brilliant blue eyes handed you a glass of water and a glucose tablet as you sat up; only your hands were shaking so badly that you couldn't grip the cool slick surface of the glass or the pill so she steadied your head against her bosom after you dropped the glass to the floor in a crash of broken glass and water. She slid the tab between your lips before tipping your head back, literally pouring water into you with one experienced motion as the back of your forearm stung; Cathe was taking a reading, "Holy crap!" she exclaimed as she read the meter, "Rachel, where'd you hide the crackers this time? We might need them."

"Cabinet over the refrigerator dear, just like always!" Rachel replied calmly, "Come on, drink up dear, you'll feel better if you do." She smelled like roast and Chanel #5, which made you feel even queasier.

"Here, you might need to eat these. Jesus Christ, kid, don't you listen to your doctor at all? You can DIE this way!"

"S-s-s-s-s-suits m-m-m-me!" You said as you fell forward out of the chair onto your hands and knees and began puking all over Rachel's clean floor. Your eyes rolled up in their sockets just before it all went blessedly black.

**Blind Leading the Nearsighted**

You woke up in the hospital with an air tube up you nose and an IV in the back of your hand. Rachel was sitting beside you, running her fingers delicately over the pages of a book. You watched her, the room spinning slightly. You must have made some sort of noise because she looked up, head swinging back and forth, eyes blank. That was when you realized that her beautiful blue eyes were useless, "Billy dear, are you awake?"

"Y-y-y-yeah." She stood up, reaching for the bed railing. Your left hand moved slowly out to her, needle tugging at the vein it was imbedded in. "W-w-w..." she slid her cool hands down your bare arm, fingers pausing at the heroin scars that decorated its inner surface like so many fading railroad tracks.

"What happened?" Rachel's round face smiled reassuringly down at you as she finished your sentence, "Billy, you had a seizure. You stopped breathing twice in the ambulance and once in the emergency room - if Cathe hadn't met you out in the parking lot two nights ago, you would have died." She reached out, one hand brushing against your cheek while the other maintained its light grip on yours, "Do you mind if I touch your face? I can't stand not knowing what whomever I'm speaking with looks like."

"N-n-n-..."

"You've led an interesting life, haven't you?" Her fingers paused lightly on the scar on your temple where you went through the windshield three years ago, before tracing the cross shaped one disfiguring your left eyebrow; the one you don't remember how you got, sliding down your face like a whisper, pausing briefly at the dressings that covered the base of your throat where must have done a traech on you. "My, but you're a handsome devil - I'll bet you've broken a lot of hearts!"

_That's not all we did with them._

"Mmmmm." You flinched as she stroked your stubbly cheek, finding a bruise you got from landing face down on her linoleum, "C-c-c-c-athe?" You relaxed back into the pillow behind you, closing your eyes. Rachel began running her fingers soothingly through your hair.

"Out looking for your...wife." Distaste filled Rachel's voice and her fingers tightened in your hair, pulling at it; you protested. "Sorry dear, we called and called but we couldn't reach her."

**Rumblings**

On the third day, you heard voices out in the hallway outside your room.

Ava was back. She'd gone to Cancun over the weekend on a whim with a bunch of her rich bitch sorority girlfriends.

She thought you wouldn't want to go so she didn't ask you if you wanted to come along for the ride.

Cathe had caught her on her way into the building that all of you lived in, and had personally driven her to the hospital.

Ava was not happy about this.

You being in the hospital was a bummer, and she wasn't paying your bills. If you were stupid enough to get yourself in this big a mess, you were on your own.

And her life was hers, and she could do what she pleased because daddy always took care of things, so Cath had better mind her own business.

Cathe said bullshit. If Ava didn't straighten up pronto, she'd personally see to it that child endangerment charges were brought up against her; and to hell with daddy.

"I'd like to see you try," Ava cattily sneered back, "Some nobody of a burned out juvenile officer dyke and her fatso femme girlfriend are nothing to someone like my daddy..."

_We should have listened._

Instead we forgot everything...

…letting go of Rachel's hand…

...when we felt the baby kick when Ava gave us a half-hearted hug while Cathe scowled at her.

So we told Cathe and Rachel to "G-g-g-go t-to h-hell!"

**Wild Honey Revelations**

A week after you were discharged, Rachel knocked at your door while you were sprawled out by yourself on the white leather couch which for once was mercifully Gaia-free, bare feet propped up on the glass coffee table, watching Passions in the black silk bathrobe that Ava gave you. Somehow relieved, you led her to the couch.

After telling both of your neighbors to go to hell, they'd left you alone. Though you hardly knew them, you missed them but were too embarrassed to go over and apologize.

With the telly flickering soundlessly behind you, you sat on the coffee table and faced Rachel. The two of you began about anything but your seizure in her kitchen last week... and Ava... and the baby. Finally she reached across the gulf between the two of you and gently placed a finger across your lips. You shut up.

"Now you're doubtlessly going to consider me to be an interfering old busybody after last week, but I feel that I must say something to you."

"Mmmm?"

"Billy, you remind me so much of my husband Charlie."

"W-w-w-what? I-I th-thought..."

"You can't help who you love, it just happens." Your neighbor sat with hands folded primly in her lap, back poker straight. "I was married to my Charlie for five wonderful years before he died. I was very...sheltered until I met Charlie. Because I was blind, my parents did everything to protect me, even sending me away to private schools - so I didn't meet him until I was 21 and he was 18. He was half Dakota Sioux and came from the wrong side of the tracks, does anybody use that phrase any more? 'The wrong side of the tracks'?" Rachel laughed her face radiant. "Anyway, my family had money, his didn't. But they were good people who worked very hard for what little they had."

You looked at her, trying to figure out what she was getting at.

Rachel continued unselfconsciously. "Daddy hired Charlie to do some work around the house, mowing, cleaning the gutters. I suppose he felt sorry for him, Charlie, I mean, because his family was so poor and he had so many little brothers and sisters. Every morning at dawn, Charlie would arrive on his motorcycle, a beat up old shovelhead Harley Davidson, park it behind the house and start working. I would bring him coffee and bacon first thing, and then sandwiches for lunch. He wouldn't come into the house so we'd eat on the back steps and share the black coffee, fry bread, and wild honey that his grandmother packed in his lunchbox every day. I'd never had anything like frybread before that... and wild honey... it was rough and sweet... like my Charlie was..." She drifted off into memory for a heartbeat or two before she shook her head, continuing:

"Sorry! After a while we started talking. I was very lonely - because I was born blind, my family protected me so much that I didn't have any friends in town; not even at church, and my brothers were all away in the Navy. One afternoon Charlie introduced me to his bike." Rachel described what the bike felt like as she ran her hands over it, inch by inch by inch, "It was warm and felt like a living thing!"

You leaned forward, elbows on knees, intrigued.

"One Sunday, Charlie showed up after church - we were Lutherans, his family was Catholic. He parked his bike in front of our house and just sat there, revving the engine. My father was embarrassed. It was a good neighborhood and he didn't like such trashy goings on. He went out to tell Charlie to take his racket elsewhere. While they were talking, I came out to, well, see what was going on and because I liked Charlie. My mother had a fit, "Charlie's a hoodlum! Let your father deal with his ingratitude!"

"Charlie helped me onto the bike in my best Sunday dress and heels even as Daddy ordered me to get away from Charlie, who told me to hang on tight before he rode away with me on the back." Rachel paused, smiling, "It was the closest to flying I'd ever come to. That day we rode up and down every road and highway Blue Earth County had to offer before he took me to meet his family and his twin sister. We sat outside in the bed of his German father's pickup truck eating still warm fry-bread with wild honey while his little brothers and sisters took turns sitting in my lap and playing with my hair. Around us the grownups drank coffee, played cards and told jokes. It was nothing like I had at home and I didn't want to leave. But I had to because I didn't belong to them, not yet, anyway."

She leaned forward, taking your hands in hers, exploring them unconsciously as she continued.

"Oh the fights this caused at home! But still I snuck out one way or another because I couldn't get enough of Charlie and his beautiful long hair, which he let me comb. I loved the way holding on to him felt as we went around a curve or passed a semi. Sometimes his sister would come on her own bike. By then, I had my own leathers; his mother and grandmother covered them with beads, fringe and feathers because they both knew that I liked the way they felt!" Rachel leaned toward you, pressing her forehead against yours, laughing after she kissed you between the eyes. Suddenly you could see her, forty years ago and fifty pounds lighter, "I've been told that my hair was bright red back then. Anyway, I let it grow out of the tight little perm that all "nice" girls kept their hair in way back in the 1960s. It felt like a flag in the wind when we shot down the road like a cannonball!" She hugged you. Surprised, you hugged her back as she continued arms around your shoulders, forehead still pressed to yours.

"What a wonderful summer! One morning before dawn, Charlie and his twin sister met me out behind the house with their engines turned off. I helped Charlie push his bike down the alleyway until we reached the street and then? Well, we rode all the way to Mankato the county seat, sitting on the county courthouse steps until it opened. I was so nervous! I thought Daddy would show up any minute with a shotgun, though he was a timid man - we filled out the paperwork and took a blood test. We had to wait three days before they would give us the license so Charlie and I hid out at his Uncle Fritz's fishing shack down on the Blue Earth River while Daddy looked for us. He was so humiliated that his only daughter had eloped with a wild boy who was also half... well, needless to say that he never called the sheriff. So three days later, at nine o'clock sharp, with Charlie's twin sister and Uncle Fritz as our witnesses, we were married! We all had breakfast at the diner across the street. Pasties and coffee. Black. Then he took me to his parent's house and we had frybread that his grandmother made that morning just for us. And of course there was more wild honey with coffee, black."

"A-a-a-and?" You still failed to understand what this had to do with you. Rachel giggled.

"Daddy was furious, but I wouldn't back down so he cut me off completely - we lived over Uncle Fritzie's tavern on the Manketo town square for five years with mobs of Charlie's loud bike riding friends and relations coming in and out at all hours - I didn't care. It was the most freedom I'd ever had. Charlie tried so hard to support me, but he just wasn't cut out for the steady life. I typed up doctor's and lawyer's notes from Dictaphone tapes on my little Braille typewriter, assembly work, anything to help. I didn't mind, I was in love. Finally, Charlie sold his bike, trading it in for a car. He said that he was getting too old for that sort of thing. A man with a family on the way had obligations so the bike had to go." Rachel's face fell and her voice began to quaver slightly as she pressed your mangled hands to her heart. "The next day he was killed on his way to work. The driver of a logging truck lost control and ran right over him at a stoplight on his way to a construction job. That was in 1970 when 'Nam was starting to really heat up."

Rachel released you, leaning against the back of the white leather couch, suddenly very small and frail looking. "Cathe took care of me all through that awful winter. She was even there when I gave birth to her nephew. She helped me raise Michael - my family never forgave me for striking out on my own so she helped support us, even going to the Minneapolis Police Academy."

"C-c-cathe?" you asked, surprised.

"Yes, Cathe - I loved her because Charlie loved her, and then I fell in love with her. Not like with Charlie, but close enough. Cathe was always the odd one out even in her own family - she was too masculine for most people. If you've ever lived in a small town, you know what that means." She sighed, pausing to rub at her eyes before continuing. "We moved to the Twin Cities area. Cathe took a job with the Minneapolis Police Department, first as a meter maid and then as a juvenile officer, which made me a cop's wife by default. It never occurred to us that anybody'd care, so we never made an issue of it, not like they do nowadays...we just felt that it was nobody's business but our own."

"S-s-s-s-so?"

The two of you sat facing each other for a long time before Rachel sighed and cupped your face in her hands. Unconsciously you leaned into her touch, savoring its gentle warmth. Her mouth worked slightly as if she was making up her mind. Finally she said, "Billy, I know your life's none of my concern, but I want you to be happy. I want you to find your own "Charlie". I don't care what gender, I just want you to have what I had, what I have. Life's too short to go without love, Billy," She paused, frowning just a little, tracing the scar on your temple, "Billy...no, that's a child's name and a child you aren't. Bill, I might as well say it and, well, g-darn the consequences! Cathe believes that your wife, Ava, is using you to get something much bigger while holding your child's life hostage. Once Ava gets what she's after, she'll toss you and the baby aside like last season's handbag. And I agree!"

Angry, you pulled away. Ava loved you, she said so. She was finally letting you sleep with her at night, though she claimed your snoring made her crazy and she wouldn't let you feel the baby kick as you lay beside her. And she wouldn't wear the little ring you'd bought for her at a pawn shop, instead preferring the more expensive one she'd bought for herself over at the nearby mall. Awkwardly you tried to stand up, to get away, and nearly fell over your own feet when your hip spasmned. Rachel reached out. Without thinking, you allowed her to steady you.

"I'm not finished, sit down." Obediently, you sat down, smarting as she continued, "Bill, I want you to do something for me. Did you graduate?"

"N-no." you'd dropped out at sixteen because it all seemed pointless.

"You can't sweep floors forever. I don't care what you may have been told all your life but you're better than that. One of these days you might have to support your child, that is if Ava doesn't make good on her threats, and I know she's made them. You can't raise a child on slave wages. Get your G.E.D., if not for yourself, for your child's sake."

**G.E.D.**

You put it off for a week until you sat down to breakfast over in Rachel and Cathe's apartment - Ava didn't keep food in the place and now that you were unemployed you didn't have any money to buy much in the way of breakfast or even lunch. Anyway, you no longer qualified for food stamps. There were G.E.D. workbooks and an application were your plate was supposed to be.

You flipped open the first booklet, appalled at what you saw. It was everything you'd dropped out of high school to escape.

"We thought you could use some help in getting started." Cathe said dryly before she put a strip of bacon in her mouth. Rachel was bustling around the table pouring coffee, "Seeing as you were so eager to get going we decided that we needed to step in so that you didn't overdo it and pull a hamstring or something." You glared at Cathe. Cathe glared back, her jaws steadily working. "Right, Bill?" she added after swallowing

Rachel handed you a plate of bacon and eggs, no toast, kissing you on the top of the head at the same time before she sat down at the table. After learning that you'd never been given any diabetes counseling aside from: "take regular readings, use this booklet to plan your menus, stay away from alcohol, and take your insulin," she'd decided that it was time for you to learn how to eat. No more entire boxes of Count Chocula at one sitting for you, mate.

Damn, one more pleasure down the crapper.

"L-later."

"You'll do it once you finish breakfast." Cathe stared you down. You looked away and started eating. Then she slid your glasses across the well-scrubbed table towards you.

**Paperwork, etc.**

You and Rachel spent the rest of the morning filling out the application. After lunch, Cathe drove you to the G.E.D. center and watched you turn it in. She leant you the fee as well. Then she drove you to the first AA meeting you'd attended in months. She surprised you by sitting down next to you. Everybody knew her name.

Later Rachel told you that Cathe had been forced to call in a lot of favors while you lay recovering in the hospital. There was enough illegal garbage in your bloodstream that night plus the doobies you'd stuffed in your shirt pocket for later to get your suspended sentence for possession activated once you were well enough to be transported. Your little accident three years ago involved heroin, but you'd unintentionally left your kit in the break room at the convenience store you'd been working at that night so you'd been cut some slack. Cathe was damned if you made her look like a jackass and had decided to ride herd on you.

Besides, she was bored and Rachel needed something to do now that Michael had been shipped off to Germany by the Air Force along with the wife and grandkids.

It also kept you out of Gaia's way.

**Gaia**

Gaia hated you.

_Now we know why._

After you got back from the hospital, Ava made a show of fussing over you while Gaia spared no chance to make your life hell.

At first it was verbal.

She made fun of your stutter, sneeringly parroting it back at you every chance she got.

She called you "gimp" and "crip" plus a bunch of Latin words that you had to look up in Ava's legal dictionary before you knew what she was talking about, which pissed you off even more because it meant that she thought you were a retard too.

_Hey, mate, wanna know something scary? We already knew what those words meant even before we looked them up. Why is that?_

Gaia caught you studying for your G.E.D. out in the park across the street the day Cathe took Rachel to the doctor for a high blood pressure checkup. She lumbered over and grabbed the practice essay that you'd been working on out of your hands. She read your work out loud in a high pitched tittering stutter before tossing it back in your face, "Why bother? You're only going to fail like the phallocentric Caucasian scum you are!"

You controlled your temper while in your mind you felt Gaia's throat collapsing between your hands as she gurgled and struggled, eyes bulging, spotty face turning a dusky purple. "It's not worth it," you kept saying to yourself, "It's not worth going to prison for the likes of her."

_Why not rip her throat out? Who'd miss her? We could toss the body in the dumpster with the rest of the trash - nobody'd be the wiser._

_Sod off Spike, you're just as bad._

_Well, sod you too, I was only trying to help!_

_Some help!_

Instead you called her a "D-d-d-dirty cuh-cow!"

Gaia got into your face, screaming, "How dare you denigrate me with your outdated agriculturally based insults, you homophobic pig!"

Leaving your books behind, you stomp-staggered across the street back to the condo, causing some soccer mom driving a pristine white Humvee packed to the roof with kids to slam on her brakes and blow her horn at you. You flipped her a double fingered salute with Gaia, smelling like a men's locker room after a big game, breathing down your neck.

"Do you know what you are Billy!" Gaia snarled, "You're nothing but a filthy walking penis who's stolen my eternal forever soulmate, crushing the life out of her with your war-mongering spirit-killing masculinity." Furious, you reached the curb, only to tip over sideways when Gaia slammed one of her Birkenstocked canoes down on your right heel as you were stepping up, sending you skidding down on your hands and knees so hard that you felt a contact fly out.

There was something in your expression when you stood up, new black Diesels torn, hands and knees bleeding from where they slid across the rough concrete that made Gaia scurry off in a squeal of dirty feet, stale patchouli and unwashed environmentally safe non-third world exploitive organically grown and agriculturally sustainable hemp underpants, extra large.

_Yeah, her death._

Shaking, you sat down on the curb, putting your face in your hands, trying to relax as the traffic rushed past within inches of the toes your beloved beat-up Doc Martins. Oh god! If you'd given in, beating Gaia senseless like you'd wanted to...

Half blind, you limped six blocks to the nearest NarcAnon meeting until Cathe came and picked you up.

**Refuge**

That night you slept in Rachel and Cathe's living room. Across the hall, Gaia was hogging Ava's white leather couch, loudly critiquing old black and white reruns of The Donna Reed Show, grinding on and on and on and on about how such shows only served to support the phallocratic status quo and therefore should be banned as pornography because of their blatant sexist misogyny. You were afraid of what you'd do the moment Donna left the screen for the evening so you'd knocked on your neighbor's door. Wordlessly, Rachel had made up the sofa bed and leant you a toothbrush.

Ava bitched at you the next morning when she met you in the hall. She'd wanted you to decorate her arm at last night's Sorority mixer and couldn't find you. When she found out where you'd been all night, your wife pointedly put a hand on her now very pregnant belly, looked at you and said, "I don't want you hanging with them."

"W-w-why?"

"They're _old_, that's why!"

**Jailbreak**

Three days later loneliness and frustration drove you right back into Rachel's kitchen where she was making a salad for her church's weekly Wednesday night potluck.

Moodily eating raw vegetables when you'd rather be shooting up, you sat watching Rachel's knife finish off another carrot, "For all the money her father has, Nellie's a very sad little girl." She said casually. You looked up, frowning through the thick lenses of your glasses. "Her family owns Scuggs, Scuggs and Rothenstein." she groped around, so you passed her a cumber which she placed on the cutting board, and after carefully positioning her knife, began to slice it paper thin. "I hear that she was sent here because her father and his brother attended pre-law at MSU-Minneapolis before founding the third largest chain of ambulance chasers in the country. For all her, ahem, fragrance, Miss Scuggs stands to inherit one third of a billion dollar enterprise when her father dies."

You dropped your forehead to the scrubbed surface of Rachel's old kitchen table as cold fear dripped down your spine and settled in your guts.

_Bloody hell, these people could squash us like a bug!_

**Diversionary Tactics**

After Gaia's rampage, Cathe and Rachel kept you so busy that when you weren't escorting Ava to various sorority events and keggers or studying for your G.E.D. with Rachel sitting across the kitchen table from you following along line by line in the Braille edition of the study guides, that you didn't have time to mess with much else. Ava didn't object, which was odd. Later you found out that the squad of Mexican illegals who cleaned the place from top to bottom every other day didn't like being in the same room with you because they claimed that you had devil's eyes and threatened to quit if something wasn't done about you.

They were cheap and discreet, so Ava turned her back on your visits.

Today you were moving the furniture around the apartment for Rachel while the local Golden Oldies station blasted away in the background on their old stereo. It was August and she was spring cleaning which wasn't as bad as it sounded; whenever one of Rachel's many favorite songs came on, everything came to a complete halt and the two of you danced to it. What was weird, though your driver's license and your therapist both tell you that you were born in 1980, you knew all the dances that Charlie had taught her whenever she'd snuck out of the house to go dancing with him at one of the rural taverns. Rachel boogied while you shuffled all over the remains of the living room, her feet sure, yours awkward. Her father despised Motown because the performers were black. Until she'd married Charlie she didn't even know that there were any singers outside of Pat Boone, Debbie Reynolds, and Bing Crosby.

_Hell, for that matter, where'd we learn the Lindy or the jitterbug? The Charleston? Or for that matter, why do we know that we can waltz with the best of them when all we've ever done is flail around in the odd mosh pit or six?_

"Let's just say that Phil Spectre and his "Wall of Sound" was an education, shall we? And Elvis? The white man who sounded black? Unspeakable!" She'd giggled up at you, blushing. "I don't know what he looked like, but my, that little ol' country boy could sing! How do I know? Charlie knew one of the King's roadies and got us backstage passes - ELVIS KISSED ME ON THE CHEEK!"

_Drusilla adored Elvis. We followed one of his tours... That's a load of old shit, we weren't even born yet!_

Anyway, you complained that it wasn't spring, and hey, Rachel was blind. She couldn't see the dirt so why did the two of you need to be doing any kind of cleaning at all? You asked this loaded question while rolling up the faded rag rug in the center of the room so you could take it down to the parking lot later for shampooing. Rachel serenely told you as she finished polishing their old coffee table that she was doing next year's spring cleaning early to avoid the rush. Then Rachel added, she was a Lutheran; even blind Lutheran women know when things aren't clean.

_Hmmmm._

Besides, for the first time since her boy Michael had been shipped to Germany she could vacuum beneath the couch.

"W-w-what a-a-bout C-cath?" You bitched as you heaved up one end of their elderly steel framed plaid sofa with its neatly patched arms.

"Cath flees at the mere sight of a dust mop."

"A-a-and my b-b-bad l-leg s-s-slows me d-down ssso I-I c-can't g-get a-a-a-away?"

"Exactly, dear."

A prescription medicine bottle full of pills rattle-rolled out from between the cushions onto the parquet flooring when you heaved up the other end of the sofa so Rachel could finish assaulting the dust bunnies. Rachel, who was getting ready to turn on the vacuum cleaner paused, head cocked to one side. "Did you hear something?"

"Y-yeah." You lowered the heavy piece of furniture back to the floor and bent over to pick up the bottle. The Shirelles were shrilling away at the top of their vinyl lungs about a heatwave, how could she have heard that? You read the label as you straightened back up.

_Oh God._

_Morphine_

Sweat began to drip down your face. You knew all about morphine, first cousin to...heroin. Heroin meant relief, heroin meant oblivion... Mouth dry, your thumb moved without you telling it to pop the lid...you paused... There was a Braille label on it as well as one for the sighted, "Catherine Dudenhoffer."

Eh?

"Bill. That was a bottle of pills I just heard land on the floor, wasn't it?" Rachel set aside the vacuum cleaner and put her hand on your arm, "We've been missing one since last night. Thank heavens the pharmacy we use makes 24 hour deliveries."

The little amber colored container was nearly full. That much plus one of the bottles of Jack that Ava kept in her liquor cabinet would solve a lot of things.

Rachel's hand slid down your arm, taking the bottle away from you, "Your child needs you dear." she said gently before she took you in her arms and held you tight. You rested your head on her plump shoulder, closing your eyes.

_How did she know?_

The two of you stood there like that for a long time before Rachel released you with a peck on the cheek as she said, "Well, that's a relief - Cathe nearly tore up the apartment looking for this. She gets that way whenever there's costs involved, never mind the big check we now get every month from the casino that the tribe now runs. It's what allows us to live in such a nice place this close to the hospital and still be able to eat... and afford painkillers." Blank-faced Rachel stepped back as she dropped the bottle into her apron pocket.

"P-p-pain k-k-k?"

"Cath is dying, dear."

Cathe who ran ten miles a day? Cathe who hollered threats and encouragements at you down in the complex's weight room because, "If you're going to be stupid and not wear your leg brace, you're going to have to strengthen that goddamed leg. Now stop whining and start lifting!"? Cathe who smoked more than you did? Who spent hours trying to help you with your stutter even though it was a lost cause? Who sternly dragged you kicking and screaming to your first root canal, only to afterwards feed you a steady stream of aspirin and shaved ice until the swelling went down?

"Cathe refused treatment halfway through the chemo." Rachel's voice was flat and fear cramped your stomach, "She said it was a waste of money. So she just walked away from the hospital, telling them to give her painkillers until it happened. That was two years ago."

Cathe who, when she wasn't ripping you a new asshole whenever she caught you sneaking sweets or not studying hard enough to suit her? Cathe who drove you to your therapist, your social worker, or your probation officer on the back of a beat up vintage Harley Davidson that she let you help maintain? Cathe who caught you last Sunday sneaking slices of raw pot roast in the kitchen, not because you liked raw meat but because you craved the blood that oozed out of it, who instead of showing disgust, gave it a try first before she yelled at you about worms? Dying? No, it wasn't possible.

"Bill, I thought you knew...now who could that be?"

_Uh Oh_

Ava was at the door, she wanted you to meet someone.

You weren't in the mood. "Oh, come on, you'll like this!" Ava insisted, smiling as she dragged you across the hall. She was wearing demure maternity clothes instead of her usual "rich bad girl" stuff.

**First Station**

_Oh God, in-laws._

..and you stood there feeling like an idiot in an old W&H Janitorial shirt that you'd torn the sleeves off of and a pair of cutoffs because it was hot in Rachel and Cathe's apartment, exposing your tats and heroin scars. You didn't do that stuff any more, hadn't done it for three years, not since that trip through a windshield knocked some sense into you...

...they stared at you from Ava's white leather couch, and you stared back, embarassed. This wasn't how it was supposed to be...

The day you got married, Ava'd told you that they were touring Southeast Asia and couldn't be reached with the good news. Now they were here, looking at you like something they'd found on the bottom of their shoe after walking through a public dog park.

Smiling, Ava introduced you.

He's big cheese at some law firm, Wolfram and Hart. The name rings a bell, but you don't know why.

She's the president of the Minnesota D.A.R when she isn't on the boards of several local and national high profile charities.

Then there's you, the father of their first grandchild, ex junkie, ex alkie, unemployed janitor, mental patient, high school dropout, and general all-purpose shitbum basket case.

_It wasn't supposed to be this way. _

You wanted them to see you for the first time in a suit, or at least a shirt with long sleeves and long trousers; something opaque so the tats wouldn't ghost through, giving you away. You'd like to get rid of them, the tattoos, but you can't afford to have them lasered off AND pay for your meds. Anyway, when you asked for Ava's help with this, she refused, telling you that she liked them just as they were. In fact, she'd pay to have more put on your hide, your choice of design. How about one on your neck? Or one on your face? How about a brow piercing, or a nosering? How about something on your lower lip, or one of those great big ear plugs?

_We would have asked Cathe to lend us the money, we would have paid her back, but we were too embarrassed…_

You shook your father in law's uncallused hand, acutely aware of your missing fingertips from when you'd started running out of veins to tap back in the worse old day. This man never had to work for a living. Golf clubs, a fly fishing rod, maybe a tennis racquet? Yes. Lifting fifty pound garbage cans into the backs of trucks, scrubbing toilet bowls and scraping gum from the bottom of chairs with a razor blade? No.

Your mother in law wouldn't look you in the eye when you shook her hand.

Worse, they'd decided to go out for dinner. You had to come too. "After all," Ava said chirpily as she gave you a big loud kiss, "You're part of the family now!"

**Second Station**

Mortified, you fled into the guest bedroom with what dignity you had left, locking the door behind you.

Half an hour later you came out, showered, shaved, and wearing the only sleeved shirt Ava'd given you, a black one, with a stiff new pair of black Diesels - twins to the ones Gaia'd slaughtered a few weeks back.

Right then you would have killed for a pair of chinos, loafers and a button down shirt; anything but the street wear that Ava'd bought for you and insisted you wear. A tie maybe or at least a sport's jacket, but Ava liked you tough. You liked being tough; the thug look kept people at a safe distance at her parties and on the rare times you went out with her in public. As a compromise, you'd removed all but your wedding band; leaving off the heavy silver bracelets and the wallet chain before tucking the one that held your medic alert tag down into your shirt after flattening the aggressive spikes of your hair against your scalp. There wasn't a damn thing you could do about it being blue.

_What a soddin' waste of time. Remember when we tried to fit in that cheerleader's world? Didn't work mate, did it?_

A look of irritation crossed Ava's face as you helped her and then her mother into their fall coats. But she held hands with you on the way out of the building and into her parent's big champagne Mercedes.

When you got there, the maitre'd had to lend you a jacket and tie before the management would even allow you in, which made Ava's mother sigh with impatience and roll her eyes. "Why am I not surprised?" you heard her moan quietly to herself.

Ava was radiant as she started to help you tie the garish borrowed tie in the plush lobby with its leather armchairs, trophy heads, oil paintings and dark, rich carpeting while her father kept pointedly glancing at his heavy gold Rolex. Your wife's face darkened subtly as she stepped back when you showed her that you already knew how to tie one.

_How the Hell would someone like us, know how to tie a tie? I mean, we've never even owned so much as a soddin clip on!_

**Third Station**

You held the door for Ava and your mother in law - apartment, car and restaurant. This too earned you the same petulant scowl from your wife.

You held your mother in law's seat, and then Ava's. This made Ava scowl at you behind her parent's back.

You quietly turned down the wine and cocktails, sticking to iced tea. This made Ava's scowl worse.

What, you wanted me to get plastered and make an even bigger jackass out of myself than I already am?

You ordered from the cheaper side of the menu by pointing, sticking to the diabetic routine that Cathe was lately drumming into you. Ava was beginning to shoot you dirty looks in front of her parents.

_What, you want me to whine for a hamburger and fries? God, I know what most of the shit on the menu is, don't know why: the closes thing I've ever come to a posh place like this was washing their goddam dishes... Do you think I want salad and rare prime rib? Bloody Hell, woman, I want Welsh rarebit with a pint, no six bloody pints on the side, I want salmon with wild rice pilaf. I want coq au vin, hold the coq and keep the vin coming, but noooooo, I'm diabetic, remember?_

She almost said something when you unintentionally showed her that you knew what to do with the half dozen eating utensils in front of you. You even knew what fingerbowls were for. By this time Ava was visibly giving off heat waves.

_What, you thought I'd drink out of the bloody fingerbowl like a dog? I know better than that, I did it when I was six in front of my mum - she smacked me on the head with her fan so hard that it broke in half, the fan, not the head. Hang on! When I was six, my therapist and the pills tell me that she was smoking brown sugar and selling slap and tickle down in Piccadilly._

You politely excused yourself; fleeing out into the parking lot for a badly needed smoke when the dessert cart, with its heavy burden of crème Brule, assorted mousses, and tarts, rumbled into sight.

_Oh God, sugar!_

**Fourth Station**

Standing out of the August rain with loosened tie beneath the striped canvas awning that sheltered the front door, you lit up, your battered steel Zippo cold against your fingers. Between the fishy stares of your new in-laws and Ava's inexplicable growing rage, you didn't know what to do.

_No, we knew exactly what we wanted to do. We wanted to call a taxi and have it drop us off at the nearest AA or NA meeting. Not because we wanted to drink or shoot up, but because sitting on a hard metal folding chair an overlit room in some VFW hall, drinking bad coffee surrounded by our fellow castaways was preferable to going back into that dining room!_

Your father-in-law joined you during your sixth Marlborough.

Wordlessly he handed you a check.

You squinted at the amount, contact lenses aching before looking at him for an explanation.

"All right then," he pulled out a checkbook and with a gold pen, wrote another one and then handed it to you after you handed him the first one back. You held it up, trying to make it out.

"Is this enough, then?" He wrote another one and held it out.

Curious, you accepted it.

"That's my final offer." He took the second check back, tearing it up like he had the first and dropping it into the pocket of his double breasted suit coat.

Puzzled, but beginning to get what was going on you just stared at him, trying to figure out how to say something without making you look like a fool.

_Don't give me that, we knew what he was about._

"My daughter Ava has had only the best in her life. What can you possibly give her?"

You knew this was coming.

"Don't just stand there like a stuffed dummy!" he said impatiently, "If you leave quietly without a fuss and relinquish all claims on my grandchild, there's another check just like that one. It's a good deal." He handed you a business card printed on heavy paper, stamped in gold, "Come to my office tomorrow and I'll draw up the papers."

Speechless you looked at him as he turned 'round and slowly walked back into the restaurant, one of the parking valets opening the door for him.

You shoved the check and the card into your jacket pocket, not knowing what else to do.

_No, we knew what we should have done. We should have taken his word for it and been a good lad._

**Fifth Station**

Unable to go back into the restaurant, you flagged down a taxi. Destinationless, you rode around Minneapolis for hours, mind blank until the driver nervously ordered you out without demanding that you pay. Ava's windows were dark, but you'd tossed pebbles at her windows anyway, drenched and embarrassed because you'd forgotten your keys until you decided that she wasn't in or was furious with you for dumping her on her folks and had decided to leave you out there.

So you tossed a couple of pebbles at Cathe and Rachel's windows. Cathe had a strange look on her face when she let you into the building, Rachel was gripping her sleeve, towels and a cup of coffee ready.

You ended up borrowing Cathe's bathrobe, a plain terrycloth one while your clothes were being dried. After that, they sat up with you, watching some shit late night talk show. You sat on the couch between them, Rachel's hand slowly smoothing the curls that the damp had brought out in your hair. You'd leaned against her like a dog, unable to focus on the pop tart of the moment being interviewed on the telly. Cathe gave off waves of silent anger that you couldn't ignore.

**Sixth Station**

Midnight came and went. Still no Ava.

Cathe and Rachel made up the sofa bed, Cathe snarling beneath her breath, Rachel murmuring at her soothingly. You fell asleep dressed in your freshly dried clothes.

**Seventh Station**

_The agony of your half-sister's teeth slashing into your throat made you choke as she embraced you naive and heartbroken in a filthy London alley, not knowing how cherished you were by people who weren't your mother until it was too late and you no longer cared... even as you watched a girl you once loved fall from a lunatic's tower, helpless to stop what was happening. Later you held her coffin scarred knuckles in your hands, looking into her empty unblinking eyes only to have her friends chase you away... but they couldn't because you were locked away in a basement with only the contents of your own head for company as you screamed and pleaded to be let out of your own coffin while a woman with the face of a debauched virgin gleefully slid a knife across your throat... as you watched your old high school guidance counselor's coffin being lowered into the ground beneath the killing sun, too timid to come out of the shadow of a crypt to join the people at the graveside for fear they would chase you away because someone like you had no right to mourn for someone like her… anyway, they couldn't because you were too busy being strapped face down on a table beneath blinding lights while a stranger did something to you while saying, "Pay no attention to his screaming. This particular species of demon doesn't feel pain the same way as humans do, it's all protective coloration." ...even as a large, dark-haired man snarled at you, "You stole it, you little bastard. It was supposed to be mine and you stole it!" He snapped your arm like a twig, leaving you curled up on the floor in a ball moaning, unable to say anything coherent because it hurt so much... of slinking off …fleeing into daylight... your blood a delicate scarlet thread rising in the clear plastic tube of the hypo as you slid it beneath a thumbnail, having run out of veins in your arms and legs ...bringing with it sweet stinging relief so that you no longer minded the taste of another man in your mouth behind a bar because it meant cash for more brown sugar... ...the rubbery crunch of cartilage of another man's nose between your teeth in some Podunk town's jail shower because you didn't like the way he looked at you... your face going through glass...bright lights... restraints... your head... tables ...strangers..._

You sat up, trying not to scream; it was six o'clock in the morning and still dark outside.

The mattress was soaked with sweat, the sheets a damp, musky tangle. You heard voices out in the hall.

**Eighth Station**

Dazed, you look around you.

Rachel's gone.

And its a different courtroom.

It's been two months since the judge declared you against all expectations, competent enough to stand trial.

Its been fast, but Gaia's father's law firm has clout, and dockets were rearranged in her favor.

Ava is there, your child within her body bigger than ever .

Her family sits behind her, sharing space with Gaia's mother, aunt, and grandparents.

Gaia's face has cleared up and she's stopped shaving her head. She's lost weight, and is wearing a tailored lavender suit that matches Ava's. Both have similar sets of pins on their lapels: PETA, Act Out, NOW, Amnesty International, the Green Party, and pink triangles. On Gaia's is a two lobed silver blob.

Squinting, you realize that it's female genitalia, rendered as art,

You always thought Gaia was a big dumb cunt. Now she's advertising it to the world on her jacket. You'd laugh if you had the energy, but you don't. So instead you settle for a long, juicy cough, courtesy of the pneumonia that followed the flu outbreak at St. Pete's, which instead of killing you has left you lethargic and emaciated so that you look like a scarecrow in your shabby, borrowed suit.

Gaia's holding hands over the railing with Ava's beaming mother, who now has a pink triangle next to the D.A.R. pin on her own lapel.

Ava's father joins them. He too wears a pink triangle and kisses Gaia on the cheek before he sits down beside his wife.

The judge taps his gavel; everyone settles down.

Today is the day you are to be sentenced.

And you are on your own. Cathe died last month when you were sick, the cancer finally catching up with her in her sleep. Like someone else you once loved, you weren't allowed to go to her funeral to say goodbye. Michael whisked Rachel away to Germany to live with his wife, and five grandchildren before she could even come and say goodbye.

You have never felt so alone.

Not even when you slept in doorways and ate out of garbage cans after you finally gave in and gave Gaia what she deserved.

**Ninth Station**

You remember confronting Gaia and Ava in the hall. They were holding hands.

Ava was wearing shapeless hemp maternity clothes, something you thought she'd never be caught dead in.

Gaia was smugly radiant and reeked of lavender soap.

Ava saw you and said, "Gaia, sweetie, go inside. I'll deal with this."

Gaia started to protest, but Ava silenced her with a long deep kiss, the kind of kiss she would give you only if others were watching.

Beaming, your nemesis closed the door behind her.

"What are you doing here? I thought daddy paid you off last night." Ava drawled up at you.

"W-where w-w-were..."

Ava interrupted you, "Look, feeb, I spent the night at Gaia's. We had a little talk." She brushed distastefully at the nondescript color of her baggy new outfit, "She finally sees things my way, which means no more crazy talk of giving all of her inheritance to NOW and joining the fuckin' Peace Corps and helpin' homeless whales or whatever after her old man dies and leaves her his third of the family business. So, before you leave town and spend your cut, do me a favor and go on over to his office this morning after ten and sign those papers so Gaia and me can get married ASAP before she changes her mind again and decides to sign all of her assets over to Greenpeace or whatever bleeding heart charity is hot at the moment, understand? Then we can all get on with out lives: me with a billionaire's daughter, and you with, well with whatever you and daddy decided was enough for you to disappear." She shoved a hand in your jacket pocket and pulled out the forgotten check, "60k? I would have held out for 100k plus expenses, but hey, it's your life. Meet me here at 9:30 and I'll drive you downtown myself, save you the bus fare."

She turned to go into the apartment and you put your hand on her shoulder, to stop her, to ask her what you'd done wrong...

"Ugh! Don't touch me _crip_! God, that's all you're getting from me, a ride and 60k from daddy, now get lost until it's time to go downtown!"

From there things went too fast. You remember Gaia coming out and calling you a retard as she shoved you away from Ava. Then you chased her fat ass through Ava's apartment as Cathe tried to hold you back. Gaia stood out of arm's reach, taunting you, "Crip! Feeb! Eunuch!" after Cathe wrestled you into a hammerlock and tried to drag you back out into the hall before things got any worse. Ava screamed, the white leather sofa tipped over, followed by the liquor cabinet. You managed to slither out of Cathe's grip, stumbling after Gaia, who threw a Jack Daniels bottle at you, which bounced off of your chest. You fell back, accidentally slamming Cathe up against the wall before you took off after Gaia. Ava in her panic ran directly in your limping path.

You never would have hurt her and the baby.

You never would have hurt Cathe, not on purpose.

_Never_.

_They just got in the way._

Flailing for balance, Ava clung to you as you dragged the drapes from a window frame with a tearing crash. Gaia turned around, saw what was happening and tried to pull Ava away from you as you tried to lever yourself upright against the wall, "No you don't, you viciously stupid representative of the phallocracy, don't you touch my soulmate," She bellowed as she bared her teeth at you, "You are beneath her!"

With your back to the wall, the two of you paused and stared each other down, panting as Ava crawled away from you and collapsed into a nearby corner, sobbing while cradling her belly.

Your heard your voice say as if from another room, "W-what w-w-was th-that y-you ssssaid?"

Gaia got in your face. "You. Are. Beneath. Her." she repeated derisively, enunciating slowly and carefully as if to a Down's child, "Buh-buh-buh-billy." Her breath smelled of peanut butter.

"I-it's B-bill." You said quietly as you gathered Gaia up by the collar with your right hand while ignoring the stab of peace symbol pins in your palm, and punched her squarely in the mouth.

_Wham. Just like that._

You felt Gaia's teeth resist and then give way behind the soft squishiness of her lips as your skin peeled off your knuckles while the sweet numbing shock of impact traveled up your arm and into your shoulder.

Blood spurted from her nose, spraying the walls.

Slowly you pulled your fist from the remains of Gaia's mouth and drew back, ready to do it again and again until there was nothing left there to torment you.

A cop tasered you in the back before you could commit murder.

**Tenth Station**

Twitching, you went face down in agony, only you didn't land on Gaia but on a darkened asphalt and gravel roof that was still warm from the afternoon sun.

_Soldiers dragged you off by the heels to a place where the lights were too bright and nobody was afraid of you._

_Strangers took away your clothes and your name._

_You screamed and someone shoved a gag in your mouth while they opened up your head and did things to you that you didn't understand._

Terror gave you the strength to break away from the cops as they were loading you into the patrol car on legs that you barely felt… still handcuffed, you hid in a storm drain, pursued by soldiers in you head and cops on the street above you, later spending the night huddled in a doorway, hungry as the medications that held you together slowly faded while your hands and feet began to go numb with the cold.

Somewhere along the way, you managed to slip out of the handcuffs.

Yammering and filthy, you walked through crowds of college students after a night game, only in your head you were trying to explain to someone that you simply had to go back to the way things were... only later to discover you'd draped yourself across a stone cross in some abandoned cemetery, surprised that there was no smell of burning meat... because you'd lost that power and all that was left behind was you.

And "you" didn't know where or who he was as he grubbed through trash cans and dumpsters, infected hand throbbing unheeded in the October chill while voices that only he could hear screamed in his ears, telling him to corner some poor woman with blue eyes and long black hair and demand the impossible from her...

**Eleventh Station**

...that's the state Rachel and Cathe, her arm in a sling, found you in.

**Crucifixion, Postponed**

A man even more professional looking than the woman that represents your wife and her lover has approached the bench even before the judge can open the proceedings.

He and the judge confer, their voices a quiet murmur in the nearly empty courtroom.

Your court appointed attorney, the same harried woman as at your competency hearing, fidgets beside you.

He and the judge appear to have come to a decision. The judge calls Gaia's lawyer to the stand.

The three of them confer, occasionally looking at you.

What's going on?

Gaia's lawyer takes a document from the new arrival, scans it, nods, and shows it to her clients.

Gaia shoots you a venomous look.

Then she shoots him a venomous look.

Finally she nods.

Ava shrugs, hands clasped over the swell of her middle.

The newcomer sits down beside your father-in-law after greeting him familiarly.

Your wife's lawyer approaches your attorney.

The two of them confer without bothering to include you.

Your attorney nods once more before saying, "Bobby..."

You interrupt her, almost snarling, "B-b-b-bill!"

She frowns at you, "All right, Bill." before continuing, "My colleague has presented us with a very reasonable offer. Are you willing to hear me out?"

You nod, ears ringing, eyes fixed on Ava.

"Simply put," Like Gaia, she enunciates every syllable as if she's talking to someone retarded but you're too exhausted to protest, "This document, if you sign it, means that all charges against you will be suspended."

_Oh God, this isn't happening._

"In return, you must agree to grant a no fault divorce."

"A-a-a-and?"

"Relinquish all claims to the child your wife is carrying."

_No! Not that! Please...not that?_

Dully you sit there, staring ahead, picking at the IV scabs on the back of your left hand, as she continues, "And you will provide 75 of all your income until said child is 21."

_This isn't happening._

She continues, "You will make no attempt whatsoever to contact this child. If you do and are found out, your suspended sentence will be carried out, without question"

_This isn't happening._

So you sit there, staring at the state seal over the judge's head without actually seeing it.

"Bob...Bill, take it. It's a very reasonable settlement. If you don't, you will go back to M.S.H. permanently, or worse, prison." impatience creeps into her flat twangy Midwestern voice. "I strongly recommend that you accept their offer."

_Joyce, Rachel, Cathe, Giles?...anybody? What am I supposed to do now?_

"Your honor, give my client..."

"No." Is all you say as you hold out your left hand. She gives you a pen and places the document in front of you on the table, showing you where to initial. There are pages upon pages and you can't make them out because there's now something wrong with your eyes that even your glasses can't fix. Finally she shows you where to sign your name.

She has to tell you what day and year it is because you can't remember.

And then you sit, coughing a little, as the bailiffs prepare for the next case.

Gaia walks past, her face sourly triumphant with Ava on her arm, her family and future in-laws gathered around her, congratulating her and each other on their good fortune at ridding themselves of you.

Your attorney shakes hands with theirs, shuffles her papers around, and finishes her coffee while waiting for her next case.

Eventually a bailiff removes your shackles and takes you downstairs for out processing

It's snowing.

**Crucifixion**

Two weeks after Christmas you received a plain brown manila envelope in the mail.

There was no return address.

But the postage mark was local.

It contained a photocopy of a birth certificate. Taped to it was the picture of a newborn baby, cut from some newspaper.

Ms. and Ms. Gaia Scuggs are listed as the parents.

You are listed as "donor" somewhere near the bottom.

_They spelled our last name wrong._

You crumpled it up, tossed it at the waste basket in your room at the group home, and missed.

It sat on the floor for a week.

Finally you picked it up but only after the orderly in charge of your hallway ordered you to after you failed weekly inspection for having a messy floor.

You meant to throw it away without looking at it.

_Honest._

But you looked anyway - after picking it up and carefully smoothing it out across your knees with your mangled hands.

"Anarchy Selene Scuggs, female, five pounds, eleven ounc..."

_Oh God. What have I done?_


	4. Baker Street

You noticed him while you were waiting for the late night Intercontinental Shuttle to London in Minneapolis International. 

At first you weren't sure, it'd been years and both of you had changed a lot.

He was polishing the floor of the departure lobby with a sonic scrubber, a slight little man wearing thick glasses with old-fashioned gold wire frames, the beginnings of a pot belly, and a limp.

That wasn't how you remembered him, but time changes people.

You stood there in your tailored Italian suit and heels, briefcase and DataBox at your feet, watching him cleaning the floor in that huge, echoing labyrinthine half-empty building as the sonic jets and upper atmospheric shuttles landed and took off in the snow-flurried darkness.

You debated, "Should I approach him? It's been a long time." "He's never once tried to contact you or anybody else." " Maybe he doesn't want to be found." "Is there anything left to say?"

To be frank, you really didn't want to and the dithering on your part was partially due to a guilty conscience because you disliked him when he was a part of your life and maybe you were a little mean to him.

Not that he didn't deserve it at the time.

Curiosity eventually won out over bad memories.

So you approached him as he steered the oscillating cleaning machine over the slick polymer surface of the main concourse, his face blank beneath its nondescript gray uniform cap, unlit cigarette dangling negligently from the corner of his mouth.

You stood there, about two meters away, just watching him.

The grace, the unearthly feline grace that you remembered so well was gone, to be replaced with a dull earthbound limp - one foot now turned subtly inward. There were fingers missing.

But it was still him.

"Spike?"

He started and then looked at you, really looked at you, the polisher still gliding silently across the floor.

His eyes behind the thick lenses were still blue, but they were softer.

Human.

So, the rumor was true.

He'd shanshued.

Spike shook his head, as if waking from a dream and said to you in a flat voice, "It's B-Bill now." before he returned his concentration to polishing the floor.

Oh.

By the time the news of Spike getting his life back made it to the Council, your employers, he'd literally disappeared from the face of the earth. Searches had been made - his experience was unique, needed recording, archiving, interpreting.

But it was obvious that Angel's grandchild didn't want to be found, so the project was aborted until more time and resources could be devoted to it. So like a lot of things from that chaotic time, Spike had simply been backburnered and conveniently forgotten for the last decade or so.

Now he was here, in front of you, cleaning the floor of a public building in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The deliberate silence, the hiss of the snow-carrying wind against the building, the echo of footsteps down distant corridors was all you heard, accentuated by the sound of the fleets of automated baggage carriers gliding past on fat rubber tires. His face in the shadow cast by the brim of the cap he wore went from deliberately blank to nervously puzzled, his eyes darting at you furtively; almost as if he was afraid to look at you because you might turn out to be a lie.

Finally he released the handles and the machine whispered to a stop. He stretched, hands pressed to the small of his back, joints popping. "I-is that you, W-Willow?" The voice, the accent, was the same, though there was now a slight stutter, a slight hesitation to it, almost like Gile's.

What was endearing in your mentor, was unsettling in your...whatever Spike had once been to you, but still you smiled, cautiously, and nodded.

His face brightened, started showing some life; coming a little closer to the way you remembered him."It's been a long time." you said with a nervous laugh for lack of anything else to say.

He looked around, nervously, "Is she...I-I mean, is she, with you? Here?"

You told him that Buffy was in Japan, quietly setting up a training facility for the newest crop of Slayers.

He looked disappointed, almost puzzled.

And...

...relieved?

You shifted on your high heels, feet hurting because you'd been on them all day. You wanted to sit down. You wanted to run away, you wanted to...

...all right, you really wished you hadn't approached Bill, Spike, whoever, because just seeing him reminded you of a lot of ugly things that you'd made a point of forgetting.

Most of them weren't his fault, but some of them were very much his fault.

"So, how've you b-been?" he asked eagerly as he abandoned the machine and limped over to you, one hand out.

Feeling odd, you take it.

It was calloused, warm.

Real.

Suddenly he released yours and pulled back as if aware of having crossed some forbidden line.

After that, he hovered, just outside of arm's reach, both hands jammed deep down into the pockets of his shabby gray uniform trousers, cautious, eager, happy to see you...wary. Asking all about you, your life since, well, then. Weren't those the good old days when everybody was together?

How are the others?

Do they ever mention him?

Do they even remember him?

Wasn't it great when we were all together?

Those were some days, great days!

Horrified you listened to him enthuse. Was he insane? Was he deliberately trying to get a rise out of you? He always was a master at that; how could your childhood and then adolescence on the Hellmouth have been great days? It was a slow motion nightmare/bad B-movie, complete with occasional intermissions for popcorn and potty-breaks. When you weren't terrified out of your mind, you were attending the funerals of people you loved, trusted, needed. - Jenny who was just beginning to initiate you into the Mysteries. Joyce, Buffy's mother, who was closer to you than your own, who was the first adult you intentionally came out to because you somehow knew that she'd forgive you for something that you had no control over. Tara, sweet, sweet Tara who tried so hard to teach you that grief and pain are both something to be endured and faced; not swept beneath the rug or magicked away - they'd all died stupid, unnecessary deaths, and Spike, no Bill had the gall to say "Those were some days, great days!"?

So, you stood there, watching this escapee from some of your oldest nightmares shift his weight from his bad leg to his good, good to bad, radiating anxious joy. Amazed at your own composure, you told him that you'd been doing all right, and since he'd asked, you and Kennedy were history.

("Goddess" aside, you'd been history for some time now, ever since the baby came and your own personal Slayer realized that being a mother to your daughter was more responsibility than she wanted, never mind that it was her that wanted a kid and had mercilessly nagged you to convince Xander to donate the necessary ingredients.)

But you didn't tell Bill everything, you just casually mentioned that you had a new lover and left it at that because soul or not, you never trusted him all that much.

Overhead the air churned and thundered as yet another shuttle took off, making the building shake.

You were tired, it'd been a long day, a long week, spent inspecting the data terminals for the Cleveland Hellmouth Center for the Council. You wanted to go home, you wanted to see your daughter, you missed your girlfriend. So you sat down in one of the long rows of empty seats at your flight gate, removed your shoes and began massaging them after you put your carry-on stuff on the seat next to you.

Uninvited, Bill sat down on the hard plastic seat facing yours, the polisher idle in the middle of the concourse.

He leaned forward, elbows on knees, mangled hands dangling loosely between them, face anxiously looking into yours, trying to smile.

Maybe wanting you to smile back at him?

To tell him that everything was all right?

What?

He wanted to talk.

So you let him tell you all about those missing years as you rubbed your tired feet and tried to be polite to him because you're a grown-up now and this is how grown-ups behave in public places.

He'd shanshued without warning in the middle of the night - he'd taken to keeping daylight hours because that's where all the action was.

The first thing he did with his second chance was walk straight into his own closed bathroom door that morning, breaking his nose because when he got his life back, he'd also regained his nearsightedness. He gave a nervous laugh, rubbing at the bridge of his nose, which is now crooked - "It never healed up right, never got a soddin' ch-chance." He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose with a forefinger missing the first joint.

You couldn't help but stare a little.

For a man, he'd once had beautiful hands, well defined, with long fingers. Now the knuckles were scarred, the remaining nails black with old bruises. One of his pinkies jutted out at an odd angle as if his nose wasn't the only thing about him that had been broken and had never had a chance to heal right.

You shake your head, realizing that you'd missed some of the story - Angel had been so angry with him for beating him to the prize that he'd fled, fearing for his newly regained life, disappearing into the wilds of America.

(...how was P-p-pea...Angel, a-anyway?)

Angel's Angel.

You both smile, his sad, yours stiff.

You've never seen Spike, no Bill, sad before. This was so wrong.

After that, he'd drifted, taking odd jobs here and there because even though he was over a century old, he really didn't know how to do anything. He'd lost the unnatural strength of his condition, and his health wasn't all that great. Turns out he was a severe diabetic. But that discovery came later after he'd been a fry cook in Memphis, a shelf-stocker in East St. Louis,

...and...

...other...

...things.

He looked away, still fiddling with the unlit cigarette. Ashamed? Embarrassed?

Somehow you got the picture. Spike, no, Bill always had sticky fingers - you remembered that more than once after he'd been in your room in the dorms, and later in Buffy's house, things had always gone missing after he left: a comb, the odd tube of toothpaste, spare change, aspirin, shampoo, the remote, thumb tacks, crackers, ball point pens, matches, paper, and after Buffy died, a framed snapshot of you, Tara, Buffy, Dawn and Joyce eating ice cream at the beach on the previous 4th of July. You later found the empty frame back on the wall, with only the picture missing. Petty theft maybe wasn't the only thing he'd dabbled in. Prostitution, hustling, drugs, fraud, maybe some jail time in between his search for a place where he fit in after he got his life back wouldn't be too far fetched.

People started filtering into the waiting area and he stopped talking, eyes studying the floor between his beat-up boots, frowning slightly as if trying to figure out how best to say something.

Just to break the silence you asked him where he lived.

He looked uncomfortable about it; so not really wanting to know anyway, you didn't push.

Then he told you that at first he'd had to keep moving because he'd accumulated a lot of enemies over the years and becoming fully human again had made him extremely vulnerable. Things had slowed down the last couple of years, and he was lucky to get away with only a few fingers missing.

(You can't help but notice that his wrists where they stick out of his cuffs are scarred, long, almost surgical slices that run along the sides, near major vessels...self-inflicted? There was another old, ugly scar behind his left ear that straggled off somewhere near his Adam's apple.)

How did he get along, you asked, pulling your eyes away from the old wounds with difficulty, "Aren't you invisible? You shouldn't even be alive now!"

Bill laughed a little, and then told you that he'd been lucky - not long before Shanshuing, Wolfrum & Hart, after calling in some favors and purging nearly a century's worth of his fingerprints stored in various law agencies' databases, had provided him with forged documents that gave him a birth certificate and the right paperwork to give him an identity had anybody ever asked. - he was a U.S. citizen who had been born in England, the illegitimate child of a U.S. soldier who at the age of six had been sent to live with his father in Mississippi after his mother died of a heroin overdose in Piccadilly. The court had taken him away from his father by the age of ten for abusive neglect and he'd been shuffled through the foster-care gauntlet until he was eighteen because "Who wants a ten year old when they can have a baby to raise up as one of their own?".

He'd laughed a little semiconsciously at the word "illegitimate", which you found odd...but enough of that, he had news:

He had a kid.

A kid? The Big Bad had a kid?

A little girl, Anne.

She's eleven.

He's never met her, but he eagerly showed you her picture, a blurry one of a baby cut from a birth announcement from some now long extinct newspaper, encased in resin and worn on a chain around his neck like a St. Christopher's medal next to an old fashioned medic alert tag.

He'd met her mother at an AA meeting after the accident.

Accident?

AA?

You knew "Bill" drank, he drank a lot, but it never occurred to you that he was an alcoholic because his old strength had kept him together.

One night after getting fired from yet another job as a night shift convenience store clerk in Cleveland for being rude to one too many customers, he took his severance pay and drank it.

Then he'd sped his car straight into a bridge abutment. Splatto!

He woke up a week later in the local hospital, both legs broken, ribs cracked, right hip crushed, and slightly brain damaged, "But I g-got over it. B-best thing to happen, really, made m-me slow down and take stock." He sat there looking at you across the gap between seats with anxious eyes, eyes that were maybe trying to ask you for something. Approval? Yours?

He then took off his cap, running his fingers nervously through his now dark thinning curls, and briefly touching another old scar on his temple before putting it back on, his rapid-fire chatter continuing as he occasionally made tentative attempts to touch you. Nothing intrusive, it was almost as if he was trying to prove to himself that yes, you were real.

"I-I wanted to call you, r-really I d-did." He blushed, "B-but I d-didn't think that a-anybody would want to talk to me after.. after..." It was then that you noticed this his right eyelid sagged slightly, and that his right hand was slower than his left. So maybe some of what he was telling you was true.

After evaluation, the court ordered him into AA, an adult half-way house...and therapy. It was either that or jail. He had a lot of points on his license; this wasn't the first time he'd had an accident and he had a record. Not a big one, mind you, but enough to make the judge look at him with little or no sympathy.

(Somehow, remembering his erratic personality, you also thought there might have been a mental institution and anti-psychotics involved. You didn't bring it up because somehow you knew it would come out on its own.)

A bunch of drying out drunks and addicts was better than sitting in his room at the men's halfway house reading the want ads for jobs that he qualified for. And he'd already spent a week in the County jail for drunk and disorderly - it was something he didn't care to repeat if he could help it.

So he'd gone to the meetings held at a local mental health clinic because they were within walking distance.

Religiously.

Eventually he stood up and admitted his alcoholism and got himself a sponsor.

Things got ugly when he started to total up his life and forgot that he wasn't around the Scoobies or Angel any more. He told his sponsor and then his therapist everything.

The next thing he knew, he was being shot full of thorazine and diagnosed as a dangerously delusional paranoid schizophrenic at the nearest state-run mental hospital, where he was repeatedly told that everything that had happened to him: William, the vampirism, Dru, the Hellmouth, the Initiative, was a lie and that all he really was was some soldier's unwanted fucked-up kid all grown up with no place to go, because that's what all his records said.

He had desperately wanted to call you, Angel, anyone, just to prove to himself that he really wasn't crazy, that you, that Buffy, that everybody was real but there were no phones in the locked ward he was incarcerated in.

He'd been so lonely that he felt that if he wasn't insane already, he was heading that way fast. For all his bluster, he'd never been on his own before, not like this. There'd always been someone else, Harmony, his weird almost-family with Angel, Darla, and Dru...the Scoobies. Before that there had been his mother and a huge circle of not-friends and relatives.

He was released two years later after Drusilla crashed a group therapy session he was in, looking for her "baby" and leaving behind six dead - she'd looked right through him before walking back out the hole she'd torn in the wall, leaving him behind. His surviving therapist willingly re diagnosed him from a hopeless cause to something that could be...controlled with the right medications and released as an outpatient. Granted the real reason for his release was never given. But the bloke simply didn't want to wind up in the same locked ward as Bill, and so had made the decision that he was now in enough control of himself to move out the main facility and into a men's group home with close supervision at all times.

With a long drawn-out quivering sigh, Bill stared down at a wad of gum on the floor between his feet for what seemed an eternity before looking back up at you, right eye slowly twitching.

You realized that it had taken a lot out of him, telling you this.

Relieved that he wasn't as crazy as they thought he was and now smart enough to confess, but not completely, he'd started going to AA meetings again because they helped...there were pills...at least he'd finally learned how to control the diabetes.

Did you know that his body wouldn't take transplants, grafts or implants of any kind and that he was one of the few diabetics left in the country who had to shoot up with insulin after every meal?

No, you'd said, reflecting on that double irony.

Anyway, he still goes, for the company mostly, he said as he fingered the pendant of the little girl around his neck. He'd sponsored at least fifty others and had been dry for nearly eleven years. He recited the 12 steps for you, from memory, word perfect You knew this because he first handed you a card with them printed on it like he was daring you to challenge his recitation.

Bill, Spike was always like that, a contrary creature - you never knew what you'd get but it would inevitably be something confrontational. One minute he'd be picking a fight with the largest person in the room, the next he'd be slouched down sullenly on your best friend's couch, boots up and sucking on a beer bottle. And then he'd disappear for days, always a welcome occurrence only to show up unexpectedly like a tomcat, acting as if he'd never left. Why Buffy never staked him, you'll never know.

Maybe even back then she felt sorry for him and just couldn't do it despite what he did to her near the end?

Uncomfortably you sat across from him as he went on and on. Eventually you realize with growing horror that he's contradicting himself, admitting that he grew up abused and neglected in Mississippi... how he'd once sat behind you in History class and cheated off of your test... how much he missed his mother's fine house in England... attending lectures at Cambridge... being a member of the Fabian Society... rowing on the Thames at dawn... juvenile detention... Dru...

Frozen, you let him talk while wishing you could run away from this painful little parade of horrors, but you couldn't because in ten minutes you'd be boarding the shuttle that was just then easing up to the departure gate.

Then back to his ex, Ava...

He'd sponsored her at AA - she was bright, petite, blonde and ambitious. She came to the meetings after classes let out at the local University. Smitten, he'd done everything he could to help her, and she returned his affections. She didn't seem to mind his little eccentricities and fears, which was a relief.

One night he'd quietly, nervously asked, and she said yes.

He showed you another picture, a creased Polaroid, from the back of his wallet. (There were a lot of pictures crammed into that little piece of greasy leather.)

At first it had gone well, he'd even got his G.E.D., enrolled, and did his best, but the debts from his accident and hospitalization, the lack of money to pay them off with, and the black marks on his record which kept him from the better paying jobs, put a strain on the marriage so that by the time his daughter was born one year later, she'd divorced him.

The papers came in the mail after Anne was born, along with a court order specifying two things: child support and that he never try to approach either mother or child.

Remembering the old Spike, you found yourself agreeing with his ex. But still it hurt to see him so unhappy.

Rolling the unlit cigarette between the remaining three fingers of his left hand, Bill looked away, eyes wet. He had been so angry, so miserable that he'd found Dru, wanting his old death back so that he could get back at his ex in the worst way possible. Dru didn't want her favorite toy any more because he was now so old, so broken, and no fun at all. She didn't even want to feed off of him because the medications he was on made him taste nasty.

He approached others, but they'd laughed him off.

They knew who he was.

A spatter of sleet hissed against the dark window, another baggage cart whirred past. You could hear some of your fellow passengers making last minute netphone calls as part of the dull background roar.

He gave up, realizing that even if he was furious with his ex, and if he succeeded in losing his life and soul, he'd probably kill Anne too. Even though he'd only seen her picture, he didn't want that. He looked down at his ruined hands, swallowing hard. "D-does tha-that count for s-something?" and you pitied him.

You found this odd, feeling sorry for someone who'd caused so much turmoil, so much discord, anger and pain.

Maybe because now he seemed so small, so lonely, so dead-end.

You wished the shuttle would hurry up so you could be at Giles' flat where you lived in between assignments abroad when your own daughter got home from school.

He told you that he held two jobs now, his "lit'l" girl would only have the best - he'd found mentions of her on the 'net, contests won, graduations, parties - her mother owned a successful law firm in Boston and Anne went to an exclusive academy - "Very bright, m-my lit'l girl, very bright!" he said enthusiastically, "And very, very pretty, I wish I could...I-I wish that I could in-introduce you to her. Y-y-you'd l-l-like h-h-h-hher. "

The shuttle finally docked, and passengers began to disembark, scattering and hurrying around where the two of you sat in a flurry of human motion.

He looked at you. Expectantly.

You didn't know what to say.

Finally he looked away, eyes following the last of the disembarking passengers as they rushed to make their connecting flights, "Well," he says, "B-best get back to work, can't afford to get f-f-f-fired again, c-can we?"

But he didn't get up.

The boarding light went on and you stood up. He handed you your purse and DataBox, his hands lingering nervously on yours. They had a slight tremor to them that you hadn't noticed before.

You thanked him before asking him if there were any messages that he wanted you to pass on to anybody?

"N-no." The shame in his quiet answer is so heavy you can almost touch it.

"Bill" stands next to you, silently asking for a hug, anything...

You don't want to, remembering him feeling you up more than once, and that one horrible time when demon-faced he'd pinned you to your bed in your Freshman year at USC-Sunnydale...and though you aren't a violent person, how good it had felt to smash a lamp over his head afterwards.

Out of pity, you allowed him to embrace you.

He clung to you tightly, resting his head on your shoulder for an eternity. (He smelled of floor polish, cigarettes, and sweat as his heart thudded violently against yours.) before anxiously pulling back. "D-d-d-don't want to mmmmake you l-late." he mumbled as he turned and limped back to his polishing, hands back in pockets, thin shoulders hunched.

You began to walk through the docking gate that led the shuttle, but you heard a familiar limp coming behind you so you turned.

He was back, nervously holding out a scrap of paper torn from a cigarette pack. He evaded the flight attendant who tried to stop him in an unexpected burst of leftover dancer's grace, took your hand, put the scrap in it, and gently folded your fingers over it as if it was a baby bird, "I-if you're ever back this way...I d-don't have mmm-much room, but you're...you're always welcome?" You nodded, pulled away and entered the shuttle.

A few minutes later, high over the curve of the earth in first class, you took out the scrap "Bill" handed you and looked at it.

On it in pencil was a netphone number and the address of a local men's group home.

You stared at it for a long time

And because you couldn't deal, you tore it up and handed the pieces to the flight attendant to throw away before you settled back in your seat and dozed off.


	5. Anarchy's Song

We noticed them sitting in the back of our classroom halfway through our lecture on 19th Century Writers. 

A man. Tall, broad, dark.

A woman. Slight, lithe, going gray, just a little.

They were still there when we started handing out last week's exams.

A man. Tall, broad, dark.

A woman. Slight, lithe, going gray, just a little.

We knew who they are without being told.

Imagine that, them. Here. In our classroom, twenty or more years after the fact.

A lot has happened between then and now.

Some of it good. Some of it bad. Very bad. Heroin bad. Jail bad.

**Intruder**

The good showed up on our doorstep one gray December morning six years ago wearing an absurd hat with a three legged orange tomcat in a carrier and said, "Hey dad, got room for one more in this shoebox?"

You'd stood there in your wifebeater, work pants and bare feet, telly on in the background turned down to a dull roar, the remote in one hand, a small caliber handgun in the other, staring at your daughter with your mouth open.

"It's me, Anarchy Selene Scuggs! Call me Anne! My spiritmother, well, Anarchy was her idea, so was the Selene, can't stand Anarchy, it's too disorganized to be a name even if it's a direct representation of Gaia's (here she rolled her neon purple lined eyes) personal beliefs, double-ditto the Selene! Puh-leeeeeeeez! do I look like a Selene to you? I think I look like a Susan if you ask me, or a Caroline! Or maybe a Fran. How about Frannie? Or Francis? What about Maude? What do you think about Maude? Or Lucille?" She chattered breathlessly while pushing past you, the cat yowling at the top of its neutered orange lungs, and stood in the middle of your government subsidized apartment, looking around, grinning. "Anyway, if I decide that I like you, and I decide to stay and that you're a cool guy and all that, I just might really-really-really-_really_ piss my biomother and my spiritmother off and change my patronymic name to yours. What do you think of Anne Margaret Tully?" She was wearing bowling shoes and socks that didn't match (one pink, one yellow). Her hair had been bleached and spiked so that it stood out in all directions like a squashed sea urchin and she was wearing a mechanic's shirt cinched in at the waist with a man's necktie, plaid green and purple. "So, what do you think? I stay, I move in here, and I change my name to yours but only if I you're a cool guy, right dad? Right? Right?"

Overwhelmed, you slid the handgun into the back of your waistband, closed the door, and leaned against it. After clearing your throat six or seven times, you managed to get out, "H-h-h-h-how ddddd-did you fffffffind m-me?"

Anne'd flashed you her mother Ava's million dollar smile from behind hot green lipstick and said, "Easy, with this!" and pulled an envelope out of her purse, which you noticed was one of those bags that people used to keep jumper cables in before everybody went hybrid. She handed it to you. It was old, crumpled, and torn. On it, in your handwriting, was your address.

It had once contained an alimony payment.

"Oh." was all you said as Anne bent over and released the cat, who limp-sidled out of the carrier and sniffed a few things before streaking beneath the three-legged couch that you propped up with your battered copy of Webster's Dictionary when you weren't using it to look up words for your crosswording.

She found the envelope on her mother's desk when she was thirteen and had asked who'd sent it because it had been addressed by hand, something she'd never seen before. Both her biomother and her spiritmother had yelled at her that it was none of her business. So naturally Anne made it her business - fishing it out of the recycling bin after they'd gone to the office. She'd kept it in her purse, always intending to look you, her father, the big-bad whatever, up.

So, today she and the cat got on the continental bullet train in Boston and found you.

You leaned over, eyeballing the cat beneath your couch. He hissed back at you. "Hope you don't mind." Anne continued, "Mom hates Bob, Bob hates mom. Bob also hates my other mom, you know, Gaia, my spiritmom? Bob's right because both are bitches who want me to be a scumbag lawyer, take over their practice, and marry their best friend's daughter, who's fat and stupid, and anyway, I like boys. Got anything to eat?" Anne said as she stared up at your dogeared Bela Lugosi poster and the one of Big Ben at night next to it, hands clasped behind her back, left bowling shoe scratching absently at the back of her razorburned right calf above its mismatched sock.

"Oh." was still all you could say.

Abruptly Anne whirled, giving you an exuberant hug that nearly knocked you off balance as she repeated, face buried in your shirt, "Honest dad, got anything to eat? The bullet train always makes me queasy so I missed lunch."

She was trembling.

You decided to postpone your suicide for a few days.

_Might as well live, still have to make child support payments, right dummy? Can't make child support payments when you're soddin' pushin' up the daisies. Never mind that the child you're supporting is now camped out on your couch and reading your books, listening to your music, watching your telly and cluttering up your bathroom with her hairspray, peroxide and toothpaste when she's not chattering a mile a minute about everything in sight!_

**Roommate**

Obviously you passed the "cool" test because Anne made good on her threat and moved in with you that afternoon, taking over your dying couch and making you dinner (very badly) because she'd once seen someone do that for their dad in some old vid that night before you went to work.

It got so you looked forward coming home at dawn from your night job cleaning floors over at the international airport even if it meant that you had to walk two blocks down to the Goodwill to buy an extra coffee cup, which was as close as you'd come to having ever given your daughter a birthday present. Anyway, Anne would be waiting for you with a badly cooked breakfast, a newspaper printout, and an agenda for her day. You were welcome to tag along if you wanted to.

Anne didn't want to be a lawyer. She told you this one morning after breakfast while painting her toenails cerise and black. "I don't know what I want to be but it's not a lawyer. Lawyers aren't allowed to bleach and spike their hair. And their socks always match, I mean, the ones that wear socks. Even the ones that don't, well, they have designer tattoos around their ankles because it's tres stylish - I don't want any tattoos because, like, everybody has tattoos and bindi and why would I want to be like everybody else? Ditto eyebrow rings and lip plates, I mean, everybody has them, what's so unique about that? I want to be me! I want a job where I can bleach my hair and spike it, wear mismatched socks, make a lot of money, wear polyester, not have to get a boring old tattoo above my butt crack like my mom's or bindi my hands and cheeks, and then get my ears, belly button and nose pierced in a bazillion places (like how lame is that?) and still have time for cats and friends. Lawyering on my mothers' level is soooooooooo boooooooooring!"

She found your GED crumpled up in your sock drawer and put it in an elaborately tacky gilt frame embellished with cross-eyed cherubs that she'd found at the thrift store before hanging it over the toilet, "Just like in Vonnegut's _Deadeye Dick_!" she happily told you after you asked her about it. Seeing the old, creased piece of paper over the porcelain throne while "bleeding your lizard" had been yet another surprise - with Anne around, you never knew what you were going to get.

_Bloody right, mate! It explains why the two of us once spent an entire weekend hitchhiking to the headwaters of the Mississippi River just so that she could take her shoes off and wade across it because she'd read about somebody doing it in an old National Geographic we had laying around. It explains why we came home one day and found that she'd thrown away all our clothes and bought us new ones at the thrift store for when we weren't at work - she had the bloody cheek to tell us that walking 'round with us wearin' worn out old work uniforms was embarrassing. Thank God they weren't hot pink and purple, but a lot black and dark reds, something with a bit of class to them. Or how about that time she loudly asked us what was it like to have a stiffy? We were sitting right there in the middle of the diner, havin' a cuppa and she just asked it like she was askin' us to pass the cream; thought we'd choke to death we were so startled!_

**Dragooned**

Anne told you one evening over burnt ravioli, a limp salad, sticky garlic toast and insulin that she'd enrolled both of you in a class: English I. "You'd better attend: I've already paid the fees and there's no refund!"

_Great. People._

"W-w-what about m-my j-j-j-job?"

"Sod the job, dad! Can't you take another shift?"

The next evening you found yourself surrounded by a lot of your fellow creatures of the night in a community college classroom with Anne behind you poking you in the back with a pencil in her excitement, and a second-hand datacube and a beat up Norton Anthology in front of you.

Turns out you were smart after all. You not only passed, you got the highest grade in the class, beating out Anne by ten points.

You, Billy Tully, the dumbest kid in class. The top scorer.

_I told you that you could._

_Who the hell are you?_

_Mind your language! It's me, William. Remember?_

_Didn't you show up around the time I got my GED and Spike beat you bloody?_

_Yes, he did. I don't wish to speak of it._

_Oy, pouf! I thought I told you to sod off, we don't need you!_

The sounds of a fistfight, with "William" taking a beating. Suddenly there's a "Whooof!" accompanied by the sound of a foot being applied to balls. Well, that's it for William, you figure.

_As I was saying... aren't you tired of people thinking that we're retarded? It's about time you proved that we are better than that._

_William? Is that you?_

_Yes, it's me. William. I'm tired of people laughing at us as we polish floors and clean lavatories. I don't know what's worse, that or the pity. Let us now proceed to prove that we are more than that. You, we, are intelligent. We've been intelligent all along only you kept listening to Spike and those pills. You're going to have to make a few decisions. Let me help. And Spike? Kindly say nothing from now on unless it's something useful._

Faintly in the background you hear Spike wheezing before he manages to get out _"'S 'bout bloody time!"_

The next semester you learned that thanks to your disabilities, you were eligible for full time student status with the government picking up the tab. You enrolled full time while cautiously considering getting a degree.

**Marilyn**

Anne went to classes in between holding down six different jobs, sometimes all at once. She did everything from clean floors with you to star in local vid commercials for some national pizza chain.

She also found your secret stash of poetry - the shit you'd been writing ever since you got yourself involuntarily incarcerated in a Minnesota mental hospital twenty years ago. She'd loaded it onto the student website. People actually liked it and asked for more.

_They really liked it? They didn't make fun? This will never do. Where's the vocabulary? Oh, feelings, I suppose the first time I left out the feelings. This time I remembered to put the feelings in and nobody laughed... what a fool I was!_

Anne was still bleaching her hair, but the spikes were history and she was wearing combat boots and plaid nylons instead of bowling shoes because they were passe.

Polyester, rayon, and acrylic were still her special darlings, but she'd discovered fur coats and now wore an elderly thrift-store ankle length mink that reeked of mothballs and shed all over everything. "You know what? I love fur! I love fur because it's almost as cool as vinyl and totally fuzzier than leather!" Anne said in between loud sneezes the day she brought her newest treasure home while dancing around the apartment in a stinking cloud of mink dandruff and mothballs, "I've always had to wear dumb old hemp sandals and Earth-friendly shit. You know when Gaia, that's my spirit mom, asked me what I wanted for my coming out gift when I was fourteen, I told her I wanted a mink coat just like Marilyn Monroe, a great big _fluffy_ one like the one I've got on - I saw it at my bestbest friend Emancipation Egalitarian's (She calls me "Anne" and I call her "Emma", it really bombs our mothers!) house one night on one of those porn channels, you know, where they show men and women doing "it" and the woman is enjoying it? Anyway, when I told my spirit mother, that's Gaia, how I found out about fur coats, she screamed at me that I was as just as viciously stupid as the sperm donor listed on my birth certificate and that fur was an obscenity and that Marilyn was an exploited victim of the male patriarchy and how could I say this because she and my bio-mom had raised me right and that I'd better light up some sacred sage and pray to the Goddess right there and then for Her forgiveness for wanting such a horribly exploitative thing... Two days later Emancipation's moms sold their house and moved out of our gated community...I never saw her again...That's when I found E.E.'s cat, Bob all wet and bloody under a bush in Gaia's meditation garden. Somebody had hit him with... well, sod you Gaia, I got my mink!"

Suddenly, you found the scent of mothballs one of the most pleasant things you'd ever smelled and even helped Anne "personalize" the coat with a skull and crossbones mowed across the back with your electric shaver.

_They're still there, him dark, her slight. Sitting in the back of our classroom like mirages. What are they doing here?_

**A Vonnegut Moment**

No, you take that back, even with Anne, things haven't all been good.

You came in before sunrise a not long after Anne showed up out of nowhere. The whole one room apartment stank of blood. When you turned on the light you found her on her knees in the middle of your living room floor, a shattered water glass in front of her, her wrists and inner arms bleeding

She was rocking and babbling, watching the blood pool in the shabby gray carpeting by her knees.

As you hurriedly grabbed Anne's wrists to stop the bleeding, she focused on you, whimpering, "Daddy, my head's all broken inside. Fix it?" before passing out.

Your heart stopped with a crash as you realized that your pretty toy, your candy-striped hot green lipped cherub in a ratty fur coat was just as crazy as you are. It wasn't your mother's heroin, it wasn't you going through the windshield of your car twenty years ago, it was you.

_We passed our insanity along to Anne; she doesn't deserve it. Darling, I am so, so sorry, how will I ever make this up to you?_

_Oy, since when did our mother do heroin, mate? She was a bloody hypochondriac, but she was afraid of opiates... ahhhhhh forget I even brought it up you wanker!_

Anne had been on psychiatric medications most of her life: she'd shown suspicious brain chemistry and even more suspicious behavior before she was two years old. This mild schizophrenic episode terrified her so badly that she wouldn't let go of your hand as the paramedics loaded her into the back of the ambulance.

Between lapses of consciousness during the ride to the emergency room Anne cried hysterically, saying that her mothers had lied about you. You weren't a retard like Gaia said, you were kind of cool even if you dressed really ugly and had the worst haircut on the planet and talked really weird when you even bothered to talk at all and where did all those scars come from and who listens to the Sex Pistols any more, they are soooooo lame! and wow, who has friends called Stinky Ralph, Headcheese and Skeech? Why do you wear glasses when nobody else does? And you wash your own dishes and your own clothes and live in only one room. And you let her read books that are written by men (!), and you take care of her and never once hit her and you don't yell at her if she even so much as looks at a boy in the street and don't nag at her to wear bindi and get something besides her ears pierced. If her two mothers lied to her about you, what else had they lied about? So she'd decided that the discreet AI medicine pump she'd worn beneath the skin over her heart since she was ten was also a lie and didn't go in for her annual refill when she was supposed to a week after she came to your apartment.

_Dear God in Heaven, we didn't know! We didn't know!_

**The Ex**

While sitting at the hospital that evening, Anne's parents showed up. The doctors accessed the serial number on her medicine pump and contacted them because Anne was still a minor.

They blamed you for everything. "How dare you tell our little girl she didn't need her medicine? If it wasn't for that pump, she'd be as big a waste of human skin as you!"

"My Goddess!" Gaia, Ava's wife, a big, heavyset woman in a tailored lavender kudzu fabric suit with a pink sapphire triangle pin on one lapel and a platinum labia on the other bellowed when she spotted the disintegrating printout of Vonnegut's _Breakfast of Champions_ that you'd fished out of an airport trash can on the bedside table. Her hand unconsciously went to her mouth where you'd punched her sixteen years ago, knocking out her front teeth. You'd been quietly reading it to yourself after Anne dozed off because you thought the noise of the vid mounted on the wall would disturb her, "I can't believe you're reading that FILTH around her, I mean, a book written by a dead white man, one of our oppressors! What else have you been doing, you MAN, forcing her to have sex with boys?" Gaia moved her hand away from her mouth, but there was still a trace of fear shimmering in her eyes as she continued her tirade.

Ava snarled at you pleasantly over Gaia's ranting as she adjusted her mini-sari, "What could you possibly offer Anne? She's been to the finest nurturing, empowering all-girl schools in England and on the East Coast that Gaia could buy. She's been on spiritual retreats in Tibet, Nepal and Burma since she was ten. We've sent her to the most exclusive pagan lesbian summer camps where she didn't have the Judeo-Christian male hegemony inflicted on her as she mingled with her own kind in an egalitarian non-judgmental all-natural setting. Her coming out party when she was fourteen cost us thirty grand alone for just the vegan catering. Billy, Gaia's and my daughter has had the best of everything - while your income barely even covers one pair of organic, animal friendly, egalitarianly hand-crafted shoes for her!"

Gaia loudly interrupted, "And if you'll remember, you MAN, you, the divorce settlement clearly stated that you were never to seek contact with our daughter or risk having that suspended sentence...what I mean is, we'll see to it that you go to prison for this as we should have years ago!"

Ava nodded smugly. "Game time is over, Billy. You managed contact with Anne somehow. Sixteen years or not, we'll see to it that you never see daylight again. Hope you like men because you'll be getting your fill of them soon enough!"

For once, you held your ground. You told them that Anne had shown up on your doorstep a few weeks ago without your asking, and as she had DIVORCED them, they couldn't press charges.

_Granted, if we could have gotten a word out without stammering it would have been more effective._

_Sod off Willie-boy, we won. Anne's ours. Sort of._

_It's William, you moron not "Willie-boy and "Mr. Tully" to you.. However Spike, you're right: we won. Some victory, we can barely keep ourselves together. But if Anne wants to stay, we'll do what we can to see that she gets what she needs._

**Small Victories**

Ava was furious. Gaia was furious.

Gaia and your ex'd pushed hard as lobbyists for teen divorce in the hopes of lining their pockets. They weren't expecting their own daughter to use their hard won legislation against them. After testing out of the final two grades of the exclusive Sapphic Academy that she attended in Boston, Anne was accepted at Harvard but changed her mind while waiting for the East Coast Bullet to Cambridge the day after the papers were signed. She cut and bleached her ankle length ringlets in the station bathroom and shaved her armpits and legs, after scrubbing off her bindis and throwing away her earth-friendly 100 animal product free designer mud cloth and kente saris; replacing them with her beloved gaudy thrift store polyester contraband. Then she and Bob the cat got on the Twin Cities Bullet and came looking for you in spite of all the years they'd spent telling her that you didn't matter, that you were dead, and even if you weren't, you weren't worth knowing.

_We didn't know she'd spent years building fantasies about us all because of a picture of us taken when we were twenty two that she'd found crumpled at the back of a drawer. That we were brave, that we were tall, that we were some sort of hero..._

_Hero? Not bloody likely. We were the villain and people ran screaming from us. I miss that. _

"Fine," Ava calmly said to you later in your social worker's office. "We'll pay her alimony, it's in the settlement. You'd better not be late with the child support... but what can a loser like you possibly offer Anne? A one room apartment that stinks of cigarettes and canned tuna? I mean, really!"

_I resent that! We quit smoking five years ago because it meant a little more money for child support. However, right now I could really use a cigarette._

_Make it a whole carton and you've got a deal mate! Hey, Ava-bitch! The tuna's not our fault! The people what lives across the hall from us live on the stuff. Can't stand it myself, makes our stomach hurt, it does!_

Your ex continued, scornfully crossing her designer tattooed ankles as she looked you up and down from scuffed Doc Martins to shabby gray work shirt and every-six-months crewcut, "I suppose you could always show her how to shoot insulin, bang your head on the wall and scream, but can you also teach Anne about the struggle our kind has had to endure in order to be where we are today in between bouts of depression? Can you teach her how to be nonjudgmental? Can you empower her so that she can thrive despite living in an oppressive white heterosexual patriarchy bent upon keeping her subservient when you aren't down on your knees cleaning airport toilets?"

You closed your eyes, counting to ten in your head like your court ordered anger management therapist had taught you. It wasn't working... it wasn't working... it wasn't wor...

"Of course he can't. He's a _man_. What would _he_ know about suffering?" Gaia drawled sarcastically as she closed the lid of her titanium datacube. Then she spotted the grocery list you'd absently jotted down on the margin of one of the legal printouts, "Gertrude Stein! Not only are you imposing your oppressive caucasian heterosexual masculinity on her, you bastard, but you're forcing her to eat meat?"

You looked her right in the eye and said quietly, "Y-yeah. H-hot d-dogs."

**Aftermaths**

Once the screams died down Anne was yours as long as she chose to live with you.

She was groggy for a few days, but was was soon back to competing with you in school like nothing had happened. She also legally changed her name to Anne Marie Tully, which somehow made you feel a whole lot better about everything.

_We steeled ourself for harassment, anything. But it never came. We only learned why years later when a file was left on Anne's desk at work and... this really isn't the time for that, is it?_

At the end of the semester, after both of your grades arrived, the two of you celebrated by going out and eating at the diner across the street. While picking at a slice of apple pie with ice cream, Anne quietly told you that she'd made a decision. She was going to be a lawyer after all.

Anne wouldn't look at you. Instead, she stared out the dark, rain streaked window, biting her magenta lower lip for a long time before she continued, for once not with her usual breathless chatter.

She didn't want to be a lawyer to please her parents, but because maybe people who bleached and spiked their hair and people who were missing a lot of their fingers and lived in apartments with walls that were so thin you could hear the people next door snoring needed a lawyer who spoke their language.

The two of you sat there without speaking, the waitresses bustling around your table as they fed the early evening crowd. Eventually you reached across the dirty dishes littering the cracked masonite table, took your only child's hands in what were left of yours and tried not to look at the still healing scars on her inner arms. Though you thought you'd die, you said, "D-do wh-wha-what you n-n-n-eed to."

_They still haven't left. Looks like we're going to have to face them because we can't exactly climb out of the window to avoid them. For one thing, it's a thirty foot drop._

_Funny, he's taking notes, and her head's thrown back, fast asleep. Hey, Will, you remember when she..._

_Some things never change._

**Rebound**

You got a note from Anne halfway through your second semester at community college. It was attached to a big bundle of undergraduate orientation flyers and enrollment forms.

It simply said, "Hey dad, ever consider being broke someplace else?"

You thought about it.

You thought about it long and hard.

You thought about it while washing the dishes, which you now were back to doing once a week because Anne was no longer around to scold you for letting things go.

You thought about it while trying to muddle your way through an Algebra I assignment.

You thought about it in the shower which needed fixing because you never knew if you were going to be parboiled or flash frozen once you stepped in.

You thought about it while polishing the floor of Concourse #5.

You thought about it on the long, slow walk home at sunrise.

You thought about it over a plate of egg and bacon substitute.

You thought about it while trying to watch morning telly as the ceiling vibrated because the two paraplegic trannie queers overhead were having yet another sexual marathon while the wall next to your chair thudded because the polygamists next door were having their usual early morning row over who got the bathroom first.

You thought about it while jockeying for position with the cat on the bed that the two of you now shared. For such a small animal, Bob sure took up a lot of space.

Finally you thought about it while looking around your apartment trying to find your other boot and mentally said, "Why the hell not? I've lived in this fleabag for uh, I forget how long. What the fuck have I got to lose?"

You sent Anne a note back, asking if she knew of any place cheap to live and that if she did, you'd be there in six weeks once finals were over.

**College Man**

Cambridge, Massachusetts was cold, damp, and miserable. It was pissing down a mixture of snow and rain the day you arrived.

_Just like Minneapolis when we got on the bullet a few hours before. Some bloody change of scenery this is!_

_Spike, kindly be quiet! We are about to enter the grounds of one of the oldest and best educational institutions in the world, even if it is only Harvard._

Anne was waiting for you at the platform. She took the cat carrier and Bela and Big Ben from you after she gave you another one of her enthusiastic hugs that lingered, resting her head against your chest while the trains whirred past and the passengers milled around you and your scant luggage.

You'd looked at Anne with shock, realizing that your daughter was extremely pretty. She'd let her hair grow back in its natural color, a brown like old honey with sun shining through it that waved softly around her face. She was also wearing a vintage black pea coat. She had one waiting for you at home, a long leather one like the coat she'd seen you wearing in one of the old photos taken before the accident, "Hope you like it, it's much nicer than that nasty old army thing you always wear. I found it at the Goodwill in a pile of old curtains! God dad, I hope it fits!"

_Where did she find those photos? I thought we'd hidden them under the mattress. Is nothing sacred? And by the way, Spike, have you seen them lately?_

_Sod off about the pictures, William! I'm tired of her asking us who these people are. I'm tired of her asking if she can meet them because she doesn't think I have any friends other than the wankers at work because I never introduce her to anybody. I think I left back them at the apartment in Minneapolis._

She took you to her place, chattering along about everything in sight as the two of you wandered across the Harvard campus through the slow twilight rain. It was a really, really cool place, and she'd told all her new friends about you, and she wanted you to meet the neighbors, who were really really nice and it had a great view of the town, and and and and and...it wasn't very big, but it was big enough for the two of you and one illicit cat, and the shower worked, and the walls were insulated, and the windows opened, and it didn't smell like tuna fish and government soy cheese. "Dad, now that you've seen my place...would you live with me and Bob for a while? Until you can afford your own place? Please?"

You didn't qualify for Harvard, so she'd enrolled you in the nearby community college. There was time for her to withdraw you? No, no, that was fine.

So you finished your Associates while living on the campus at Harvard, but not in their classrooms.

_But we cleaned a hell of a lot of their floors and lavvies for good ol' W&H Janitorial same as back in Minneapolis because nobody else in town would hire us, just so we could make child support payments for a child we were living with, right Willie? Bloody elite can't even piss straight, leave a bollicky mess all over the place, is all!_

Because she was pretty and outgoing, Anne had a constant stream of weirdos in and out of the apartment - which you never moved out of because every time you tried to move out to give her space, Anne would talk you out of it. You never got used to the river of mooks, never mind that hey, they made you look normal. Theatre majors, crackpot theorists, ufo fetishists, neo-techno-vamp-goths, you name it. None stayed for long, just long enough to amuse Anne and make you nervous because the last thing she needed was to hook herself up with some loser bigger than you.

You applied for admission at Harvard for the hell of it.

_We've been accepted, Spike, we've been accepted!_

_Right, mate. Our "handicapped" status's an instant ticket because they've been accused of not enough diversity. Being a schizophrenic ex-junkie alcoholic makes us a hot item, never mind that we're whiter than white. They recruited us, figuring that we wouldn't last half a semester and we surprised them, going on to a Master's because we had sod all else else to do and you, not me, liked the work._

The government picked up the tab. Everything else came from grants.

You earned a Bachelor's. You applied and got into Grad school.

So you, Billy Tully, now William, no Will, Will Tully, had a Masters.

The dumbest kid in the Class of '97 had a Masters.

In English lit.

_Which showed you how dumb Billy, no Will is. We could have been a doctor, an engineer, something highly paid, but a degree in English literature? With an emphasis in the 19th century? Bollocks what a dummy!_

_Kindly be quiet Spike; you're ruining our triumph._

_Bugger off, time to go looking for another floor cleaning job before the que gets too long over at the welfare office._

"Bloody hell you are!" said Anne without looking up from her datacube. She was studying for the Bar. "Apply for a teaching job. You did all right as a TA last year. Get one of those somewhere and get a life while you're at it!"

_Easier said than done, pet!_

**Dogs and Ponies**

They loved your grades. They loved your "rags to academic riches" background. However, though it was illegal to discriminate, they didn't dig your history of mental illness, and well there was that teeny problem with having a minor criminal record - not that being clean for the last twenty years wasn't a good thing but somehow assault, possession, burglary, property damage plus drunk and disorderly were just a little too much for the average administrator to want to handle...

_See? What I tell you? Why bother?_

"Dad, don't be a wanker, try some of the smaller schools."

_I say, I hadn't thought of that!_

After a lot of wangling, and a year of watching Anne study for the bar and cleaning floors, a small liberal arts college in Southern California asked you mid-semester if you could come out right away and take over for a professor who'd dropped over dead of a heart attack in the middle of a lecture on 19th century Women Writers.

"I'll take it."

That was a year ago. You showed up at this little town somewhere in Southern California, queasy from the bullet train, with a duffel bag of everything you owned, Bela and Ben rolled up under your arm, and wearing a second-hand suit.

_Soddin' thing itched! No more second hand suits from now even if we have to steal one!_

_Spike!_

_Just yankin' our chain, Willy!_

Anne had come with you a few days before to look the place over and it passed. It was small, quiet, and felt oddly familiar. Maybe because it was like the town you'd washed up in when you were fourteen after being shuffled from foster home after foster home. You kept expecting to turn some corner and see someone you knew, but it never happened.

_How many times have we got to tell you, Will, how do we know that this "Billy" ever existed? We've been finding discrepancies, like your sister Drusilla, she's dead, but we've never found a record of her death! And the only William Michael Tully that was born on our birthday in the public records died at the age of sixteen in a drunk driving accident..._

_Clerical error? She was murdered and the body never found? We were born in England, we haven't checked there yet... So then, mate, can you explain why this place feels like home?_

_Let me think about it._

The administration was glad to see you. Semester break would be over Monday. Sign here, here's your keys, here's a map of the campus, here's the other guy's syllabus, and here's the address of the house we're supplying you with.

_A house?_

_A house comes with this job? _

_We won't have to sleep over at the homeless shelter because we can't afford a room right now? Soddin' fantastic!_

Sorry it's full of the other man's personal items, but his sister says she'll come clean it up by Wednesday, if you don't mind.

_Hell no, I don't mind. A house!_

It wasn't much, but you could deal. The college owned a slew of small early 20th century bungalows in the older section of town, within walking distance of the main campus. Living there was one of your perks. If they decided to extend your contract, you could stay there as long as you didn't destroy the place.

_A house!_

_A real honest to God house!_

It was a bit run-down and the yard had gone to jungle years ago, but the roof kept out el Nino when it counted. If you slammed the doors too hard, the windows rattled, but it was a house!

**Be it ever so humble…**

Taking a machete to the bamboo that overran one side of your new home gave you something to do in between lectures and grading essays. So did chasing the raccoons out of the basement and the bats, who cared if they were endangered! out of the attic.

Then there's the assistant head of Anthropology, a well endowed bint in her forties who lives in the house next to us. She keeps inviting us over for tea after she found out that we were once English.

_I find her somewhat aggressive and overbearing._

_Can't be too picky at our age, William. Wanna bet we wind up in bed the next time she invites us over. 'S been a while. I say we leave our shirt off every time we work in the yard just to make sure she keeps asking us over._

Your predecessor's sister didn't care about his books and let you have them. They covered most of the walls in the living room, overwhelmed both bedrooms, and overflowed into the kitchen. Sorting out the duplicates and evicting the squatters (mice and at least one good sized rat) also killed time that you otherwise would have spent in front of the telly. Which you found buried behind a stack of unfinished manuscripts.

**Huh?**

Anne's fiance showed up, one look at the place, and told you that you were out of your mind to live there. Considering the income that he was pulling down as a cyber surgeon, maybe it was a shack, but it was your shack.

_Sort of. _

_Until the university sends us on our way. _

You told him that free was free and you can't beat free so he shut up and helped you dig the squirrel's nests out of the solar collectors on the roof.

He said at the end of the day: "All right dad, if you insist!" Then he presented you with a heavy duty methane-powered chainsaw and a hard hat because he was "Damned if he let you mess up all that work he'd done on your head."

_He's still taking notes; her head is still lolling. It's almost time to dismiss the class and face them._

_What do we have to say to them? Sod all or sod nothing?_

They'd liked how you handled a classroom, and the curriculum wasn't too bad even if your approach and appearance were a bit over the top even for academia, so, contingent on you getting your Doctorate in the near future, they decided to offer you the position despite your working class "in your face" approach to Brit Lit. as well as everything else. You could stay at the house.

Anne's taken a job with a small law firm/detective agency in L.A. - a half hour commute by monorail. She's excited to be in a different place and lives in the other bedroom when she isn't off with her fiance. She's told you all about her new boss, some big hulk of a guy with a neanderthal brow who doesn't say much, but she likes the work. Despite the weirdness of some the cases, she feels like she's making a difference, not like in some big firm. She just wishes they could pay her more because she wants to help you pay off your medical bills faster...

I know coincidence is cliche, but?

You dismiss the class and they stand up, going against the flow of fleeing students. You sit down on your desk, pushing your glasses back up the bridge of your nose.

It really is them. Things slide 'round in our head just a little, but we can deal.

They're glad to see us, where've you been? How come you never kept in touch? Jeepers, what a surprise to see you here, literally on their front doorstep - all these years and they thought you were dead.

And you say anything. Finally you tell them that the custodian needs to clean the place up, do you have time to drop by for a cuppa?

**Flying**

Since it's within walking distance, you take them home, you on the mountain bike, backpack full of lesson plans and textbooks, cruising 'round them, long duster hanging down like a cape in the cool evening air, circling at a cautious distance, slowing down, pushing the high tech bike along to talk to them before taking off again and again.

_Anne gave us this bike for our birthday because we can finally ride one. Remember that long hot summer in the south of France, when we were seventeen and managed to slip our mother's leash? We rode for miles, by ourself on, what kind of bike was it? I forget, touring villas, forts, and churches, getting drunk on the scent of the lavender farms, trying to work up enough nerve to approach all the pretty girls we..._

_Saw and utterly failed to get off with? Willy, no, William, I soddin' remember that. I also remember getting sunburned and our first drink of absinthe, too. And that telegraph that came, yanking us back to mummy because the doctor thought she was really going to die after all... I also remember going back years later when Dru set me free and eat..._

_Spike, that was then, let's not remember the bad stuff, shall we?_

_I thought that was the good stuff._

You still aren't legal to drive - the chip in your head that now controls the seizures and your stuttering is still too new a technology for the authorities to consider giving you and hundreds of others that privilege.

**Under the knife**

In your third year at Harvard, your hip gave you such a twinge when you stood up in the bleachers during one of Anne's field hockey games that you blacked out, concussing yourself on the seat in front of you.

You woke up dizzy and nauseated in the hospital. They x-rayed your skull. It wasn't broken, but there were other things that had them concerned. So there were MRIs, CATS, and a dozen other tests that you couldn't even pronounce. There was a lot of scar tissue in places where there shouldn't be scar tissue. You told them about the accident. They accessed your records, some of the scars had already been noted as old... you admitted to having been severely abused as a child. The injuries weren't consistent with... It looked as if some ham-fisted amateur had literally gone in with a sharpened soup spoon... if you wanted to, they might be able to repair some of the damage and reduce your dependence on anti-seizure drugs; it might even clear up the stuttering. All you had to do was consent to letting them install a chip about the size of a thumbnail in your head.

Alarm bells went off deep inside you; you remembered a bright, cold shiny place and the smell of formaldahyde and freshly sawn bone, so you said "N-no!" You could live with stuttering and the occasional twitch.

_Oh God, I remember that place, it was horrible. I remember what they did to us... make it go away!_

_Shhhhhh, Willy-lad, aren't you glad I was there to help you survive it?_

By the way, they added, you're going to have to do something about that old car injury. Your hip's collapsing after years of strain, and between that and the arthritis you'll spend the rest of your life in a wheel chair if you don't do something about it soon. It's an easily fixed problem, some simple bone grafts in a series of reconstructive surgeries... the alarm bells screamed louder, so you said, "Fffffffine, tt-t-t-t-rell mm-e where I c-c-can get a g-gg-ood one, ch-cheap. I'd rrrrather be tt-t-t-trapped in a w-wheel chair b-before I let you ssssons of b-b-b-bitches t-t-touch m-me!"

_I don't want to wake up not myself, not again, not again, not again, not again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again..._

_Shhhhh, Willy-lad, it's over, it's over, I'm here, it's over. Spikey got us through; he has his uses, right? He got us through and he'll get us through again..._

You and Anne argued over it for a month, with you sitting on a bag of ice and eating painkillers in between classes. "Dad, do you really want to be stuck on wheels for the rest of your life?"

_...again, again, again, again, again, again..._

"S-s-s-sod o-off!" you snarled. The thought of letting a bunch of doctors get creative with your insides made your skin crawl, bringing back a lot of horrible nightmares you thought you'd left behind. Anne was being almost as unreasonable as the time she decided that "Dad needs to get laid!" and paraded all sorts of eligible young men in front of you until you finally yelled at her that you didn't "do" that! "Oh," Anne'd said, her face closing in on itself like she was trying not to cry, "Sorry, how was I to know?" and then ran just about anything with in a bra past you until you told her that, yes, you liked girls ahhh, women, "B-but these things cc-c-an't be p-pushed." Anne'd stormed off in a huff, but eventually she'd apologized, telling you that it always pissed her off when her mothers used to parade the daughters of their wealthier clients and colleagues in front of her hoping that she'd chose one of them... "While we're at it dad, for once in your life wouldn't you like to be able to get a word out without stumbling over it? They've been using the same technique to control epilepsy for years, it's perfectly safe!"

_...again, again, again, again, again, again..._

Eventually you submitted, grumbling and bitching all the way to the hospital where they took bone out of your good hip with you watching under local because you didn't trust them. You were then told to come back in six months so they could start rebuilding you down there because that's the time it would take to grow new bone from the sample they'd taken. And you signed the release allowing them to install a chip in your brain...

_...again, again, again, again, again, again..._

Six months in a wheelchair didn't help your temper or your mental state. You're still amazed that Anne's still speaking to you after that ordeal.

_...again, again, again, again, again, again..._

You went in a week early because of your diabetes and also because they had to start the treatments that would bypass your weird immune system, the one that had kept you from any sort of transplant or grafts. Whatever it was it started with a couple of shots that made you throw up.

...again, again, _again_, again, again, again... shhhhh, Willy, shhhhhhh, I'll take care of this.

And then throw up some more.

_...again, again, again, again, again, again... shhhhh, Willy, shhhhhhh._

And then when you thought you possibly couldn't throw up any more, you threw up again and got hot and then cold and your hair fell out and you were a basket case.

_...again, again, again, again, again, again... shhhhh, Willy, shhhhhhh, I'll take care of this._

By the time they wheeled you into the operating room you couldn't let go of the gurney and they had to anesthetize you before moving you to the table. It's not that you didn't want to be operated on, but your hands wouldn't let go of the railings because they remembered that long ago cold hard, shiny place where you screamed and screamed and screamed while someone cut into your head and...

_...again, again, again, again, again, again... shhhhh, Willy, shhhhhhh, I'll take care of this._

**Huh? (Again)**

Anne was there holding your hand when you woke up in the recovery room. It wasn't the hard shiny place and you lay there in the dimly lit warmth, crying with relief . The only change was that you were in heavy traction and the back of your head was numb. Anne fed you ice chips, promising you ice cream the next time if the stem cells that they'd injected into your pancreas did their job like they were supposed to. This was because you'd signed another release at the last minute...

_Shhhhh, shhhh, it's over. Willie, aren't you glad I was there to help? Old Spike has his uses, right? Right! Oh God, my head hurts..._

_...let's just say the next three operations went better, we could at least let go of the bed railings and the nurses no longer had the urge to smother us with our own pillow because we were so nasty about everything. _

_Our hair eventually grew back, which was a bloody relief._

That was also when Anne met her fiance. You came home one night, opened the door to the apartment you shared with her, turned on the light and caught the two of them snogging on the couch. You beat a hasty retreat, the image of the doctor that had put the chip in your head with his hand up your daughter's skirt burned in your retinas. Which you absolutely refused to have tampered with. You could handle more craziness or a wheelchair, but you were damned if you let them accidentally blind you!

We had a little talk with him the next day when he made a final adjustment to our chip under local so that it integrated better with the medicine pack in our chest. It was weird, lying there with a hole in our head, telling our future son-in-law, who had a probe in our brain, that no, we didn't mind him being with your daughter, but bloody hell, warn us next time! And by the way, can you support her in the manner that she's become accustomed to? Which made us laugh because wellllllll...

He was o.k. about it, or maybe Anne'd told him about your eccentricities. He was also Jewish, which was o.k. too. He was disappointed that Anne wouldn't convert, having adopted your attitude of "Yeah, right!" early in your relationship and she wasn't about to change her mind in the near future.

The wedding was in two years and would you mind giving her away as you were her only living relative? Funny, she never mentioned your ex and her wife, and you didn't set the record straight.

_Oh, and they'd met while we were in the recovery room after the first operation and had gone out for coffee every night until we were strong enough to go home. Right under our nose, just like some French farce!_

_With dirty pictures?_

_Spike!_

**The elephant in the room**

You're home now. Anne's houseplant jungle hogs the wide front stairs, and her wind chime collection's a little overwhelming, but what the hell!

You let them in your front door, turning on the light, letting them see your place. Books and dirty dishes cover every surface. Bela Lugosi and Bob the three legged cat stare down arrogantly at them from above the fireplace. You hear her gasp a little, "This is just like mom's..." and he takes her hand. You pretend not to notice, shoving things off the couch and chairs, asking them to sit down.

You talk more, how is? She's got a coven of her own and recovering from breast cancer. Her daughter looks just like her ...and? We don't see much of him anymore. He owns one of the biggest contracting firms in the Midwest...And? ...dead of a heart attack in his sleep, we didn't know.

Uncomfortably, they ask you about yourself. You tell them what you can because just looking at them makes things slide 'round in your head like they haven't in a long time and it's getting confusing. You especially don't mention having met Willow fifteen years ago in the Minneapolis International Airport, and the nervous breakdown you had afterwards; the one that got you re-Institutionalized for six months...So you just sit there grinning at them for a long time before ordering Afghani takeout.

Over the last of the kabobs (You notice he doesn't eat much...that hasn't changed either.) the elephant in the room waves it's trunk at everybody. "Now seriously, why the hell didn't you contact us all these years? We looked all over for you and not a trace!"

_They did? They really did?_

Honest, we did. We gave up because we thought you'd had enough of us...or were dead.

No, definitely not dead. Just, ah, busy. You look down at your missing fingers with shame.

Eventually over cups of strong, syrupy Arab coffee it comes out, the accident, heroin, booze, jail, the asylum...and worse. And Anne. Don't forget Anne.

**Anne**

Anne was why they were able to find you. While introducing himself to his newest staff member he noticed an enlarged framed snapshot of you at twentytwo on her desk and asked who you were. He realized that it was you, or maybe it was you. Anne had been happy to tell him everything she knew. They'd been looking in all the wrong places, and now here you were, right where they expected least.

Things are sliding around in your head, but it's no longer unsettling, it's reassuring. You're still crazy, but not as crazy as you thought you were.

They ask, do you want a job? I mean, look at this place, we can't... no, no, I'm happy here, maybe later. Need to take things slow. Would you look at the time?

**Truth**

It's two a.m. and you walk your guests down to the bullet station, them on foot, you back on the bike because you enjoy the feel of the wind on your face. Nobody says anything until they begin to climb aboard.

You take her hand, asking, "Was any of it real?"

"What do you mean, real?" She turns and looks down at you, puzzled.

"The Hellmouth, me dying, the, the Initiative, Darla, Dru...you? Was all of that real?"

"Yes, of course it was. I was there, remember Spike?"

"Call me Will?"

Frowning slightly, Buffy touches your face, kissing you lightly on the cheek before letting go of your hand..

You watch the running lights of the bullet train rapidly diminish towards L.A., your mind the quietest it's been in a long time.


End file.
